Image

The image the richness of which ows a debt to the word that has the task of plunging the depth, the symbolic image, even didactic in extreme cases, does not render over time a good service either to images or to words, to the social organization from which it has sprung and to the concept. In a certain sense, it takes advantage of the unspoken that it ideally contains in order to implicity refer to all that might be said about it. Blackmailing by definition, it extorts its own content under threat of denouncing the inability to understand, the intellectual narrow mindedness of the person observing it. The intrinsic limitedness of the image comes back like a boomerang against it, forcing it to establish an immediate link between the visible and the invisible, to bet on this last element, precisely that which in the image, it claims, constitutes the truly significant and vital aspect, insofar as it expresses its irradiative force. Therefore the blackmail becomes complicity, the stable attributes of the organic in service to consensus. But then, in order to set the value of an acquisition it is enough that socially determined thought is limited to coining an original-sounding definition. There's always time for deeper inquiry. But in reality, as artists know all too well, there is not a minute to lose. As a result, if the image cannot limit itself to being simply beautiful, decorative, it must be assigned a content that leads it back, undamaged, to the harbor represented by reason, to artistic, social and once again conceptual parameters, today first and foremost the fact that the image is narcissistic in a way it never was in the past. Here, where critical thought could and should finally work, we find instead the sentinels of justification at any price, the priests and and priestesses of rationalized tastes, sniffing out beatification. Even the voice that proclaims itself contrary is in appearance. As pathetic as it may be, it remains a member of the winners' camp, simply having set up tent on the opposite side of the camp. The only true loser: thought.