Later this year the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego will be staging a show by internationally-marketed, Dutch-based photographer, Ruud van Empel. His super-manipulated pictures of children and nature create a mood of queasy fascination when first viewed – but personally I find that the fascination-aspect quickly fades while the queasiness-aspect takes over altogether. Yet I can already see how this celebration of seemingly-green artificiality will in one form or another remain a mainstream aesthetic stance for the foreseeable future, and can see even better that I will always be too old and cantankerous to embrace (or even comprehend) pictorial work that aims in its heart to mimic video-games and 3-D movies.