The greatest challenge lay in the fact that photographic and cinematic processes could accomplish better and faster – and with a diffusion a hundred thousand times greater than was possible for pictorial and narrative realism – the task that academicism had assigned to realism: protecting consciousness from doubt.
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the question: what is the postmodern?”, in The Postmodern Explained to Children (Sydney, Power Publications, 1992). (via chipclayton)