In her Sight Unseen Anne Marie Willis from Team Des argues that truth as correctness of the gaze became the basis of Cartesian rationalism --and we can add British empiricism and scientific positivism. She says that:

Vision was the model of knowledge for Descartes, and the theory of consciousness his thinking inaugurated was one in which there is a clear divide between observer and the observed, ‘a disembodied observer seeing with his mind’s eye’ as Jay puts it. ‘The look that sunders and compartmentalises’ became normative and integral to the development of Western culture (as cause and effect) — the foundation of science, exploration, art, technology and much else. Framed by modes of representation, correctness became a question of correspondence between sign and referent, and was codified into realist representational practices from classical sculpture, then later, with the invention of perspective, through to painting, photography, then moving image, then moving image plus sound …. and so on.

Coupled to this mode of seeing is the rise of the sign-driven economy with its creation of desire through the look, the image, style, brand identity; here too is the dominance of the televisual, of spectacle, of the hyper-real.