CORRESPONDENCE

THE POWER OF IMAGES

David Freedberg

The Power ofImages seems to have inspired John Nash to write an eloquent and at times even moving
review (Art History, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 566-70); but it is not about the book I wrote. Nash's review
offers a kind of testimony of faith in art; but that faith is so strong that it blinds him to some of
the central arguments of the book. It also leads him to attribute to me a series of positions which
I do not in fact hold. For example:
At no point in The Power of Images do I speak of innate response, or even of an 'innate mode
of human response', as Nash puts it on p. 566.
2 Nash seems to think that I do not believe, as he does, and as most people now do, that 'responses
are made in a context of social activities, beliefs and concerns'. But I repeatedly acknowledge,
from the first page of the book to the very end, that context conditions and pressures response.
Any number of other commentators have noted this. For example, in his installation The Play
ofthe Unmentionable, which happened to deal with several of the issues I raise in the book, Joseph
Kosuth displayed the following extract from The Power of Images to accompany his long section
on Pornography and Censorship:
Arousal by image only occurs in context: in the context of the individual beholder's
conditioning, and of his preparation, as it were, for seeing the arousing, erotic, or
pornographic image. It is dependent on prevailing boundaries of shame. If one has
not seen too many images of a particular kind before, and if the particular image
infringes some preconception of what should not be or is not usually exposed (to the
gaze), then the images may well turn out to be arousing.
3 A further mysterious allegation is that I do not realize that responses are determined by people's
needs and projections. But whole chapters, such as those on Votive Imagery and on Pilgrimage,
are devoted to the ways in which the needs of men and women (in particular periods and in
particular contexts) elicit and determine certain kinds of responses to certain kinds of images.
Nowhere do I suggest that images, autonomously, have a power of their own. Indeed, from
the introductory pages of the book to the very end I make it perfectly clear that the power of
images arises from the interaction between images and people, and from those needs and desires
and so forth that men and women project onto them. Given the amount of contextual material
I provide throughout the book, the allegation that at any stage I suggest that 'responses to images
are immediate and passive' or that for one moment I believe in the notion of an 'unmediated
cognitive response' - to use Nash's phrases on pp. 568-9 of his review - is simply bizarre.
What then could have led a reviewer, apparently capable of cogent observation, to construct
such a fantastic version of my book?
Aside from Nash's perverse claim that I believe that I have found proof of an 'innate mode of
human response to images', the first part of his review (consisting of a patchwork of quotations from
The Power of Images), gives a fair enough selection of some of the positions I do hold - though to
say that I am 'determined that "sign fuses with signified to become the only present reality'" (p.
567) is a gross misreading. I am 'determined' about nothing of the kind; what I am interested in
are thosecases when 'sign fuses with signified to become the only present reality'. Nash declares straight
out that he finds the positions outlined until that point in his review (midway through p. 568) all
'completely mistaken'. This, of course, is any reviewer's prerogative, and I have no argument with it.
But what made Nash incapable of going beyond the charge that I believe in innate responses,
and what went wrong in the second part of the review? Since the reasonably accurate series of
quotations in the first part is followed by something that so completely distorts the positions I hold
one can only wonder at what happened. The issues at stake are serious enough.
From the introduction of the book on, I make it clear that the fundamental position from which
I start is the acknowledgment that context conditions response. Anyone with more than a passing
acquaintance with my work knows about the extent to which this has informed everything I have

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written. Every article since 1971 onwards insists clearly on the importance of context. At least two
early pieces served as a kind of manifesto for precisely the view that historical conditions determine
responses, namely, 'A Source for Rubens's Modello of the Assumption and Coronation oj the Virgin in
Leningrad: A Case Study in the Response to Images', Burlington Magazine, vol. CXX, 1978, pp.
432-41, and 'The Hidden God: Image and Interdiction in the Netherlands in the Sixteenth Century',
Art History, vol. V, 1982, pp. 133-53. What can Nash have been thinking of?
Nor, for the record, was I first 'led to my topic' (as Nash puts it) by the 1978 attack on Poussin's
Dance Round the Golden Calf. Even a cursory glance at the bibliography would have revealed that I
have been publishing on iconoclasm and censorship (and attitudes towards images more generally)
since 1971.
But there is barely a sentence in the second part of the review which does not misrepresent my
position. For example, when Nash reflects on p. 570 that 'we may, indeed, discover in them [i.e.
images in museums] the attractions ofthe aesthetic', the insinuation is that I disclaim the possibility
altogether ('none of these fits Freedberg's sense of the power of images'). Well, I do not disclaim
anything of the kind. It is simply that this is not the type of response I particularly wanted to write
about, since I thought that quite enough attention had already been focused in that direction.
There is much more of this sort of thing in Nash's review: 'We may of course be far from finding
them [i.e. images preserved in museums] powerful and, on the contrary find them unattractive and
alien ... '. The same insinuation again. There is plenty in the book about unattractive and alien
images - though here, true enough, I would take issue with Nash: can he really mean what he
seems to be saying, namely that unattractive and alien images cannot be powerful? It is unlikely
that he really means this; but if he does, then I suppose we have yet another difference of opinion.
Perhaps these misrepresentations all resulted from Nash's anxiety over what he took to be my
hostility to formalist criticism, art history, and the category of art in general. This is something about
the book which seems to have upset a number of other reviewers as well. But anyone with more
than the thinnest of skins would have been able to see that there was no attack on any of these activities,
or categories per se. I made it clear that the issues were institutional and related to current practice.
In fact, I have been responsible, in some of my other work and certainly in my teaching, for a not
inconsiderable amount of formalist criticism; I like the activity of art history and think it is a reasonably
important one; and I happen quite often to be moved by great art, the sort of art, say, that most
educated people in the West agree on as being great.
But I was not concerned with any of this in The Power of Images. What I was concerned to do
was to demonstrate the ways in which high formalism, art history, and our notions of art seriously
impede our analysis of response; and to suggest that unless we incorporated a fuller, more serious
acknowledgment of the kinds of responses I wrote about in the book, art history would remain an
impoverished and retardataire discipline. Art history is neither of these things essentially; it is this way
only because of the accident that its practitioners tend to be blinkered and afraid of acknowledging
some basic things about the ways in which men and women behave in particular contexts (the sort
of contexts I was writing about). None of this seemed a terribly complicated point to make; but
it certainly scared some people.
So when Nash suspected that I might actually hold some positive views about the kinds of work
we both regard as art, when he smelt a whiff of something he held in common with me (such as
a sense of what I, roughly, called the redemptive powers of art), he levelled the charges of inconsistency
and self-contradiction. There was no inconsistency here; only honesty, and acknowledgment of context.
But even at this point peculiar things started happening to my text. Nash was so keen to allege
inconsistency that he even had me attacking art historians 'who are skeptical of all views of the
redemptive powers of art (and of great art in particular)'. Once again he chose a verb before a quotation
in order to generate something that has litile to do with what I have to say (cf. the case of 'determined'
above). The interested reader who turns to the page in The Power oj Images cited by Nash (p. 431)
will find that I do nothing of the kind he suggests. There I refer to a particular approach to art
history ('the approach to art that sets out to reclaim original context, or to reclaim appropriately
contextual critical terms') which 'is often adopted not only by those who are dissatisfied with the
strategies of high formalism but also by those who are skeptical of all views of the redemptive
possibilities of art (and of great art in particular)'. There is no attack here on 'those who are skeptical'
etc. - only an observation about a certain kind of art-historical practice (note, too, the 'often' in
the sentence).

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What anxiety my critique of the shortcomings of art history seems to have induced' It is true
that I believe that the notion 91''art' has outlived its usefulness, heuristically speaking. I also happen
to think that if we are to be concerned with behaviour and response, the notion of art clouds more
than clarifies our vision; and that it paves the way to self-deception about the realities of response
(however beneficial and redemptive sublimation may be). The Power oj Images was not intended to
be about the fit between the canon and the pleasures many of us may derive from art. It certainly
was not about beauty, or about art (as I declare on the very first page of the book), or even about
what Nash with characteristic vagueness calls 'the attractions of the aesthetic' (Nash, p. 570). The
book was about response; and it seemed a matter of concern to me that art historians, blinded by
notions of art, refuse to acknowledge the extent to which their responses to the great and canonical
things of our culture are of the same order as their response to lesser images. I have no doubt that
Nash and his ilk will continue to deny this and splutter on about context and 'the attractions of
the aesthetic'.
Art history may not be ready to consider the possibility of a level of response which has to do
with our biological and neurological status (note that I speak of 'level of response'); and it may be
even less ready to see that the study of history can contribute to these issues; but what can have
sparked so consistent a misreading of my views, and so warped an attempt to allege that I did not
say exactly what, in fact, I did say? It may be, given my strictures on art history, that such a response
by an art historian to my book was inevitable; but I suspect that it has much more to do with one
of the symptoms of modern art-historical and art-critical response which I identified often enough:
the fact that so many of us involved in talking and writing about art cannot face up to the full
consequences of acknowledging the role played by emotion and the senses in the way in which we
respond to all figured imagery.
To say this is not in any way to deny - as my book makes clear - that our responses to what
we and others like to call art may indeed be different from our responses to other classes of imagery.
It is an index of the continued fear of art historians that as soon as I deal with the potential of images
to arouse sexual and other possibly uncomfortable responses they clamour that I do not attend to
context. I almost certainly wrote too little about the gendered construction of arousal; this is a topic
I hope to take up at some length at a later stage of my work. But it seems that as soon as art historians
like Nash sense that there may be something about our own responses that allies us with what they
feel to be primitive, or deranged, or simply too emotional, they take refuge in context. 'This does
not apply to us', they want to be able to say, 'our contexts and conditions are different. We are not
mad; we do not make such mistakes.' And since Nash and one or two other critics seem to have
made a point of talking about masturbation (not a subject I discussed), one can only assume that
this is exactly one of the things they were afraid of.
The fashion of saying that everything is contextual has now become so strong that when one
suggests that there may be philosophical problems arising from the way we speak of context (for
one recent view of such problems in the context of the institution of art history, see M. Bal and
N. Bryson, 'Semiotics and Art History', The Art Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 2,1991, pp. 176-80), some
people fail to see the problems at all and immediately start crying 'context, context' - as if context
could conceivably be something a priori. But how comfortable for those who are convinced of their
own cultural superiority! One has only to consider how Nash speaks about art to understand the
profound elitism of an art history that insists on a hypothetical general beholder who, for example,
does not 'mistake the ersatz for genuine'. In fact, Nash goes even further, for he declares that 'the
beholder should not mistake the ersatz for the genuine. He or she should not succumb to illusion'
(Nash, p. 570, my italics). And why not? After all, it happens often enough - except, presumably,
to those of us who have learned from the practice of our discipline never to mistake the ersatz for
the genuine, or to succumb to illusion, or even to throw off the Kantian shackles on the relations
between emotion and imagination. The prescriptive arrogance is breathtaking. So, too, is the naivete
of the commitment to the value of 'art' and the vacuous sentimentalization of 'imaginative power'
- to say nothing of the way in which Nash's concluding paragraph has to resort to those appealing,
but ultimately unanalytic, notions of the creative imagination and the power of 'dramatic visualization'
(whatever this more precisely may be).
In this final, elevated paragraph, Nash argues for the power of images that is derived 'from the
power of the hands and the minds that made them'. The very last thing in my mind when I wrote
The Power oj Images was to assure my readers of the nobility of the manual and mental labour that

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goes into the making both of images and of that which we comfort ourselves by calling art. I haven't
the slightest doubt that Nash will remain irritated by this position; bur he ought at least to have
got the book straight, and not allowed his discomfort to get in the way of the simple points I was
making about some of the more difficult aspects of the way in which men and women respond to
images - whether or not we call them art.

David Freedberg
Columbia University

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