Art & Creativity Quote by Henry Flynt

Flynt is poking at a quiet scandal in “classical” oil painting: the idea that a supposedly timeless craft can be steered by a machine’s way of seeing. The “radical turn” he names isn’t just about sharper realism. It’s about a whole ethic of perception getting outsourced. The camera doesn’t simply record; it imposes a logic: fixed viewpoint, frozen time, a world flattened into optics. When painting starts chasing that logic, it risks becoming a prestige version of reproduction, mistaking technical exactitude for truth.

The phrase “technological modification” does a lot of work. He’s not treating photography as a neutral tool that artists can borrow from; he’s treating it as an intervention that rewires attention itself. In that frame, the “problem” isn’t nostalgia for pre-camera art. It’s suspicion that modern vision has been disciplined by devices: we learn to value what can be captured, framed, and verified, and we unlearn other kinds of looking - duration, touch, ambiguity, the bodily sense of space.

Context matters here because Flynt comes out of the 1960s avant-garde orbit where the fight wasn’t only over styles, but over what counts as an authentic experience. His discomfort reads like an early diagnosis of a culture sliding toward lens-mediated reality: images that feel authoritative because they resemble photography, even when they’re paint. The subtext is a dare to painters (and viewers) to stop confusing the camera’s accuracy with human seeing - and to notice what gets lost when art accepts the machine’s terms.