Worth More Than a Thousand Words

By Jo Morten Weider

A picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words. Wikipedia explains this idiom in 967 words (I used word count in Google Docs). Here are 36 of them:

“It refers to the notion that a complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image or that an image of a subject conveys its meaning or essence more effectively than a description does.”

Text and art have been intertwined for centuries. But things really took off when surrealist artist René Magritte famously wrote: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (“This is not a pipe.“) across his painting in 1929. The use of text played a central role in understanding the work. Since then, clever wordplays, political activism, subversion of advertising, and appropriation have become common characteristics of text art.

So how much is a picture picturing (almost) a thousand words worth? As these examples of purely text based artworks show, alot.

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