Reading Reflection: In Defense of the Poor Image

In Hito Steyerl's essay, In Defense of the Poor Image, she discusses what the "poor image" is and why it should be considered an art form, as it is a reflection of today's conditions of existence, similar to the clusterfuck aesthetic. The "poor" image can be a degeneration of artwork that is of suboptimal quality; it can be composed of image artifacts, low-res images, or distorted, muffled sounds. Steyerl says of the poor image,"the poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction." Perhaps the poor image just emulates what modern art has become; it is constantly copied, appropriated, and modified into a low form of art. Much of today's art is digital and the concepts of art are no longer tangible but represented on a screen or a print. Such is real life- we've become fractured and copied and available for mass consumption.