Weaver was a Dartmouth philosophy major; his boss, the redoubtable David Sarnoff, president of RCA, which owned NBC, had never gone to college. Weaver believed that television could be “an enlightenment machine.” He fought against what he called “the robotry of habit viewing,” and opposed giving the schedule over to soap operas and situation comedies, generic staples of radio. He invented the special: his theory was that a large number of people will tune in to a program if there is buzz about it. The theory seemed to be paying off—NBC’s broadcast of the Broadway “Peter Pan,” with Mary Martin, attracted sixty-five million viewers, almost forty per cent of the entire population—when, in 1955, Sarnoff removed Weaver from the presidency to make room for his son. For the next twenty years, CBS, which had no compunctions about stuffing its schedule full of soap operas and situation comedies, ate NBC’s lunch.

The theory at CBS was the reverse of Weaver’s. It was that people don’t watch programs; they watch television. The job is only to have your show be the one they end up watching once they turn the set on. They don’t have to feel good about themselves for watching your show; they don’t even have to like it. What Weaver deprecated as “habit viewing” was just what CBS was looking to exploit. At NBC, the policy was referred to, contemptuously, as LOP—Least Objectionable Program—but it worked. CBS broadcast, in prime time, “I Love Lucy,” “Mister Ed,” “My Favorite Martian,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and “The Munsters,” all of them about as dumb as they come, and all of them huge hits. From 1962 to 1964, fifty-seven million Americans tuned in to watch “The Beverly Hillbillies” every week.

Neither CBS nor ABC gave much thought to late night until Carson showed the entertainment world that there was gold in those distant hills. They had been earning little or nothing after eleven o’clock, generally giving the time to their affiliates, who sold the commercials and ran old movies. In 1964, though, CBS and ABC started looking for talent to go up against Carson and NBC. Between 1964 and 1972, a number of men were pushed into the arena. One of them was Dick Cavett.

The question to put to the art of the present, then, is what does that art appear to see as the beliefs in the culture of our own moment that are similarly structural, similarly the core of our present ideology; and how does art envisage putting those beliefs to the test? I have talked somewhat generally about “beliefs,” but of course for visual artists it is beliefs about vision and visualization that count, or, rather, beliefs that take the form of images—of fresh modes of visibility, or dreams of knowledge arranging itself in specifically visual form. We all know that such beliefs are at present the cutting edge of a new myth of modernization. Oursler is typical here. Any artist with smarts is going to see that the dream life that matters currently is the one promoted by the World Wide Web. But how is that dream life going to be put under real pressure? We are back to the problem implied by Marx’s “Teach the petrified forms how to dance by singing them their own song.” Mimicry is not enough. Nor is hectoring from the outside. It has to be singing. But singing involves hitting the right note, being exactly on key. It involves not an approximate knowledge of what the age of the digital believes about itself, but an intuition (of the kind that Manet and de Chirico managed) of precisely the central knot in the dream life—the founding assumption, the true structure of dream-visualization. It is easy to fake modernity’s uncanny. Modernity, as Benjamin reminds us, has thrived from the very beginning on a cheap spectacle of the strange, the new, the phantasmagoric. But modernity also truly dreams. The art that survives is the art that lays hold of the primary process, not the surface image-flow. …

Just as Manet, with one side of himself, fell for the notion of capitalism as pure realm of appearance, present-day visual artists can hardly avoid the glamour of the notion that the verbal is over and the visual has replaced it. But just as Manet in practice discovered that the realm of appearances was also one of identities, fixities, constraints, and determinations, I dare to predict that once the present ecstasy of the virtual and nonverbal is put to the test of form, it too will be found wanting. And I shall stop pretending to be neutral and say why. I shall end by offering artists of the present a few antivisual, antidigital slogans.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that the age of the Word is finished. On the contrary, words are still everywhere. And the image machinery we have created and disseminated is just a means for making those words over into images—that is the trouble with it. The ghost abominates the current means of visualization in the culture not out of nostalgic “logocentricity,” but because it sees our present means of symbolic production as essentially flooding the world with verbiage—with the simplest of words (the most banal and transparent of knowledge-motifs) given sufficient visual form. Sufficient, that is, for the motifs to make their hit, name their product, push the right paranoid button. Everything about the actual configuration of image-making in the world around us speaks to that fact. The system’s notions of image clarity, of image flow and image density—they are all essentially modeled on the parallel (and unimpeded) movements of the logo, the compressed pseudonarrative of the TV commercial, the product slogan, the sound bite. Images are still everywhere telling stories or issuing orders. Web pages, billboards, and video games are just visualizations—magnifications and speed-ups—of this prior and continuing world of the shouted (or whispered) sentence.

And at least [this] bitterness points to a complex of problems which, for the moment, our culture wishes not to recognize. If there is to be a visual art of postmodernity, in other words, I think it will have to begin from [anger, skepticism]. It will have to probe, as Manet and Picasso did, at the concepts that truly organize—that produce—our present fictions of the now. Once upon a time that meant mobility, and the free play of appearances, and the great myth of individuality. Those were Manet’s and Picasso’s raw materials. Nowadays it is the notions of virtuality and visuality. It is time this imaginary was put to the test of form.

One can still enjoy Greenaway’s sarcasm and aesthetic eccentricity up to a point, if only because his intelligence, his art-history background, and his craft all provide a certain novelty in the art-film terrain that he has claimed since The Draughtsman’s Contract. That film had a pleasurable puzzlelike aspect and an intriguingly grim view of art patronage that fit in nicely with the handsome visuals and the cruel eroticism and wit, even if the laughter that greeted its showings often had an ugly and dehumanized sound to it. I got even more kicks out of A Zed & Two Noughts, my favorite Greenaway film, because of the sheer perversity, beauty, and complexity of its multifaceted conception. But I walked out of The Belly of an Architect, bored silly by the symmetrical center-framing and the turgidity of Greenaway’s preoccupation with midlife sexual crises, and even though I stayed to the end of Drowning by Numbers, I was just as bored by the mechanical jokes, conceits, and cruelties that made up the bulk of that film.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is in no way inferior to these last two films, though it’s highly likely that one’s attitude toward it will be determined by how many times one has already ridden through Greenaway’s narrow and maliciously nuanced structural exercises. If you would enjoy a sadistic filmmaker calling you a cannibal for sitting through two hours of attractively framed nastiness and abuse, you might find this picture to be right up your alley.

Greenaway’s frozen and aristocratic sense of irony — a major part of his equipment, and my major bone of contention — puts quotation marks around virtually everything that we see and hear; but without a context for this irony, we wind up responding to it as if it were a wallpaper pattern rather than an existential position, a dandified form of decoration that is too willful to be very funny, much less witty. If Greenaway were producing only wallpaper, I’d have no reason for complaint; by the same token, if making movies were a matter of academic achievement — showing how well he’s learned his lessons — I’d give him an A plus. Sergei Eisenstein once quipped of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, “It’s a good PhD thesis” — quite unfairly, in my opinion, because that film has both an emotional directness and an academic clunkiness that his remark overlooked, the precise opposite of what Greenaway has to offer. I couldn’t call The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover a good PhD thesis because it has nothing serious to prove, but I wouldn’t hesitate to admit that it’s immaculately researched, conscientiously footnoted, and perfectly typed.

Usually citing the cool music, or Zidane’s gladiatorial good looks, people uninterested in soccer have often told me the movie exceeded their expectations. For die-hard fans, on the other hand, the film was something of a disappointment. It was hard to put your finger on, but something was missing. It wasn’t only the lack of suspense that came from knowing that Real Madrid would beat Villareal—many of us happily watch taped replays, tributes to past legends, countless Youtube clips. And it wasn’t exactly that we couldn’t see the other players—in fact, David Beckham and Juan Carlos both had entertaining cameos, coaxing laughter from the otherwise stoical Zidane. And there was no lack of sporting drama: Zidane chipped the ball to Ronaldo for a crucial goal, and curiously, in the closing minutes of the April 23, 2005 match Gordon and Parreno happened to record, the leading man was sent off for brawling.

But even before the portentous red card, Zidane’s essence as a player was omitted from the film. Although his chiseled body and strong personality were both impressively larger than life on the silver screen—you could study his scowl, his famous hairline, his quicksilver feet—the attributes that mattered to his soccer were conspicuous only by their absence. The obvious fact was you couldn’t see what he saw. Teammates shifting back and forth, the ill-fated positioning of an opposing defender, the split-second gap—all this happened off screen. The intricate angles, uncanny foresight, and precision timing that comprise the advanced calculus of the killer pass—these were nowhere to be found. Zidane’s commanding intelligence was thereby excluded, supplanted by huge beads of sweat, white socks, eyebrows.

If the filmmakers replaced Zidane’s vision with their own, it wouldn’t be the first time a portrait managed merely to objectify its subject. Oddly enough, it wasn’t even a debut for this particular method. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait was actually a rehash of Helmuth Costard’s Football as Never Before (1971), which featured the famously attractive George Best as the sole focus of eight 16mm cameras as his Manchester United beat Coventry 2-0 on September 12, 1970. Gordon and Parenno added a few more (and more advanced) cameras, and they added a post-rock band, but the idea sits firmly in the twentieth century.

Which raises the question: Just what makes this a 21st century portrait? Taking the title lightly, Gordon & Parreno simply made a timely remake, one they obviously couldn’t have called Football as Before. Technologically speaking, we did get much improved resolution; historically, the movie provides a unique record of the most important player from the turn of the millennium. Aesthetically, the question is trickier. That it reprises an innovation from the last century seems both typical of our era and somewhat disappointing, but the fact that the film’s structure works to exclude its own content seems even more representative of our time. Repeating Costard’s invention and leaving out Zidane’s, this beautiful film ends up seeming both opportunistic and a missed opportunity. Strangely, it is the sporting perspective—which at first seemed tangential, or even distracting—that offers us this modest insight. How long will we wait until they put the camera on the player and let him do the filming?