For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.
Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?
Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.
Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.
Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.
The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space — how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!