ABSTRACT
A New Way of Seeing I remember one view of the Earth from 90,000 miles out: the north and west in ragged shadow; the bright Caribbean; the atlas shapes of the Americas; a high cone of storm cloud in the far South Atlantic. I glanced from its memory to the spinning globe of BBC-l presentation: light, untextured, slightly oiled. It was necessary to remember that both were television. The old art-and-reality contrasts seemed particularly useless in a week like that. If the medium is the message, the massage, the messuage, or whatever the latest slogan may be, it is still surprisingly plural. What we see is what we are, but to be moved, abruptly, to a quite different viewpoint was a technical achievement with some of the qualities of major art: a brief transcendence, in the power of a new way of seeing.
