ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the challenge that criticism faces when approaching a non-linguistic artistic medium such as sculpture or painting. Criticism, argued in the chaptermay gain from allowing itself to close its eyes, as it were, that is from an inward view to reinvent the works it talks about through a poetic critical language. As it seems to invite such connections, the chapter indirectly draws on an idea articulated by Adam Phillips in his essay 'Nuisance Value': and the theme of art and poverty expressed in the language of poetry. The artist whose work is explored in the chapter is the Italian sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti. A similar kind of blindness, the kind that recasts seeing, is central to the work of Giacometti, and in particular to what we can see in the eyes of his sitters. Blindness has become the key to sculpting or drawing a face.
