Delacroix's journal entry for September 1, 1859, considers the deleterious effects of too much detail in both art and literature.
Delacroix’s entry for September 1, 1859 from his famous “Journal” reads:
"…when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture; we do not see blades in a landscape, nor minute blemishes in the skin of a charming face. Our eyes are fortunately incapable of perceiving such infinitesimal details and only inform the mind what it needs to see….
"What makes modern literature inferior is the attempt to reproduce everything; cohesion disappears under flood of details, and the result is boredom. In certain romances, for examples those of Cooper, you have to read through an entire volume of conversation and description in order to find an interesting passage. The same defect greatly spoils the novels of Walter Scott and makes them exceedingly difficult to read; the mind wanders dully over pages of emptiness and monotone where the author seems perfectly happy to be talking to himself.
"Lucky painting, that requires only a glance to attract and arrest the attention!"
* * * * * *
I agree with Delacroix that too much detail can be distracting. He mentions Cooper’s books, and I am reminded of Mark Twain’s savage essay against Cooper’s book “Deerslayer”…. Indeed anyone reading the book can’t help but feel like the writing takes forever to go nowhere, and its dialogue is a tortuous blend of stilted academic English and imaginary frontier dialect. Not only is it inaccurate, it has way too much detail….
Regarding his comments about art, I agree that too much detail can be distracting. I began to notice that my family photos developed from Advantix film were sharp and detailed to the point of being painful to look at. They were so detailed they hurt my eyes. Now we’re in the age of high-def TV. A huge screen displaying an oversized image that’s equally detailed and perfect from one end to the other. Our eyes don’t see things naturally in this sort of way. Normally our eyes focus on an object and the rest of our field of vision is blurred and out of focus. Does a high-def TV give us too much of a good thing? Are we going to get sick of it?
With our greater technological control of imagery through photography and film, possibly we're going too far from the essential abstraction or individual interpretation that is essential to art. Think about the appeal of black and white photos. Isn’t a large part of our appreciation of black and white imagery that they are a classic example of "less is more" and of leaving something to our imaginations? In an age of hyperrealism, perhaps we desire a retreat to an earlier era when works of art were more suggestive and provocative. Anyone ready to give up her high-def TV?
