Art (with a capital A) is always winding up in famous little spats with its sometime bedfellows: Art Vs. Commerce, Art Vs. Religion, Art Vs. Elitism. As our world becomes even more steeped in bytes and hard drives, there's another conflict that I think is increasingly playing itself out: Art vs. Technology. Sometimes, in a program such as California State University Summer Arts, you can really feel the tension between the two.

Was Tim Grey's Sunday night lecture at the Fresno Art Museum an example of art? Or was it about technology?

I vote for the latter. And I found it flat and uninspiring.

You could go round and round about the intersection of art and technology, of course. Artists have been doing amazingly clever (read: technical) things from time immemorial, from the first cave painters who learned how to mix pigments in the correct proportion to Abstract Expressionist sculptors who needed extensive background in structural engineering to make their pieces stand up. Depending on the medium, any artist worth his or her salt needs to be proficient in a certain level of technique -- even ones who call themselves "unschooled."

And with the very nature of digital photography, a certain degree of technical expertise is a requirement. (You might not have to know how to build or repair a computer, but you certainly have to know how to operate one.) I'm not claiming that a focus on the "pure" creative process is the only appropriate subject for an arts-related program; it's fair game to focus on the technical aspects of a medium.

The disappointing lecture didn't have anything to do with a lack of expertise, either. The amiable and photo-loving Grey is an expert in his field. He's written many books about Photoshop and is in constant demand as a lecturer. Perhaps the problem with Sunday night's talk is that he tried to key it so much to a general-interest audience that that it didn't really contain much information at all -- either technical OR artistic.

Grey showed a number of "before" and "after" examples of his own photography: the original, unretouched version; and the new-and-improved PhotoShop version. Grey is the first to admit that he's more skilled at the computer than behind the lens -- "I found myself better at Photoshop than taking photos in the first place" -- and showed the audience specific examples of a heightened image here, a technical trick there. His goal when altering images, he says, is to combat the disappointment when you take a photo of an amazing scene and aren't able to capture the "reality" of what you saw. (The interesting thing is that you use these artificial techniques to duplicate the natural sophistication of the human eye.) By working on a picture in Photoshop, you can play with texture, detail, density and contrast to achieve a certain mood.

One problem that Grey faced was itself technical in nature: the digital projector that he used in his presentation wasn't very color-true, and I have a feeling that the audience lost much of the nuance of the changes he made in the "after" pictures.

Still, it would have been more effective for Grey to organize his lecture by tips on general techniques (here are some good examples, say, of improving a photo by boosting contrast) rather than the random travelogue order (pics from Joshua Tree, Japan, etc.) he chose. Or, perhaps, he should have used more inspiring or dramatic photos to make his points. Instead of the evanglical zeal that I think he wanted to convey, the impact was more mundane.

Again, I realize the limitations of the equipment and Grey's attempt to pitch what he was saying to a general audience. But his lecture didn't fire me up even a little bit about the possibilities of PhotoShop. To me, that's where the art is.