images

That is why for many years Irwin declined to allow his work to be photographed, because the image of the canvas was precisely what the painting was not about.

Indeed, the problem is even more complicated than that. For in a very real sense the achievement of these paintings was in their making, and the finished canvas at one level is only an incidental relic, a fossil of that original process of discovery: not only do you have to be present before these paintings in order to experience them, it may be that you have to have made them as well.

The poet does not confer the past of his image upon me, and yet his image immediately takes root in me. The communicability of an unusual image is a fact of great ontological significance.

Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.

Architecture of our time often appears as mere retinal art.

The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.

I’m sure we’ll see the rise and widespread use of authoritarian AI analytics, fed a constant stream of images and audio recordings, finding crimes that never happened in the blur of a street scene or hearing things were never said in a citywide wiretap—call it the Gosling Effect—resulting in people going to prison for the evidential equivalent of faces that were never really there.

Half a century ago, Stern discussed this attribute of an artistic object and called it apparency. While art is not limited to this single end, he felt that one of its two basic functions was "to create images which by clarity and harmony of form fulfill the need for vividly comprehensible appearance." In his mind, this was an essential first step toward the expression of inner meaning.

The personal experience of most of us will testify to this persistence of an illusory image long after its inadequacy is conceptually realized. We stare into the jungle and see only the sunlight on the green leaves, but a warning noise tells us that an animal is hidden there. The observer then learns to interpret the scene by singling out "give-away" clues and by reweighting previous signals. The camouflaged animal may now be picked up by the reflection of its eyes. Finally by repeated experience the entire pattern of perception is changed, and the observer need no longer consciously search for give-aways, or add new data to an old framework. They have achieved an image which will operate successfully in the new situation, seeming natural and right. Quite suddenly the hidden animal appears among the leaves, "as plain as day."

Everything points to the conclusion that the phrase 'the language of art' is more than a loose metaphor, that even to describe the visible world in images we need a developed system of schemata.