o título original não o ponho

But, somehow, this all makes sense, here.

. . .
There is a eureka moment that most visual artists have at some point early on in their career and, once the moment has happened, they take their first steps across the great divide between visual art and literary art, two camps to whom words mean totally different things.

Once sensitized to text as an art object, the visual artist must, in a way, learn his or her own language all over again from scratch. One looks at the shape of words and the texture of the paper they rest on. One looks not just at the book, but at its cover. Visual culture is a very free and permissive place; high culture, low culture, pop culture, all source material is permitted if it’s a part of your world.

Literary students, however, don’t relearn their language from a visual and material standpoint. They are, if anything, actively encouraged to consider the process infra dig, and are certainly never allowed to fetishize the physical, typographical form of a word. In France there exists the convention of standardized unemotional text-only book covers — basically, a Salinger-like belief that a book (excuse me, a text) ought to speak for itself and not be compromised by such vulgarities as cover art, non-standardized fonts or author photos. Words exist only inasmuch as they denote something individually and collectively, but that is all they are. They’re merely little freight containers of meaning, devoid of any importance on their own. To see words as art on their own is heresy.

This inflexibility makes sense to a non-visual thinker, but to visual thinkers such dogma is depressing and sad, like forcing ballerinas to wear suits of armour.

in Visual Thinking, Douglas Coupland
(the whole article here)
Blog no NY Times