The art critic at work

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between word and image and the consequences both for the development of art and for the relationship between criticism and art. It shows how an ever-growing mixture of pictorial (image) and poetic (word) registers at the basis of image rhetoric is cultivated and deepened by advertising. The invasion of the image by the conceptual register of the word strengthens the classical dichotomy between sensitive and intelligible, leading to a limitation of the imagination.