Welcome to the Cultural Revolution

Abstract

The messenger who came rushing into the art world, as into the discipline of art history, some thirty years ago, bringing news of the recent invasion of the textual into the domain of the visual, could have saved his [sic] breath. The visual arts have always battled the onslaught of a verbal production-from ekphrasis to allegory; from ut pictura poesis to iconography2-that modernist art managed, briefly, to stun but never totally to silence. If, during that time, semiotics became a tool of choice for certain theorists and historians of art, it was more in the hopes of taking a naive conception of the verbal and, by critiquing and exposing its unexamined assumptions about representation, of making it thereby a sophisticated means of analysis, than it was a switch in practice from a basis in image to a basis in text. And even as this semiologically minded project was unfolding, the modernist bulwarks were themselves giving way to a flood of the retextualization of abstract art, so that the most austerely antinarrative, nonobjective paintings were being rethematized and recentered around an ever more imperious Logos.