ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the implications potentially indicated in the title, some of the ways in which the terms may be seen as interacting. Since the 1970s both traditional art-historical methodology and the category of visual art have been subject to incursion from other disciplines, initially from linguistics and semiotics, increasingly from a postmodernist scepticism towards master narratives or a deconstructionist emphasis on the metaphoric or figurative dimensions of all language. Questions were raised around the relationship of the verbal to the visual, of the discursive to the figural, issues which were to concern art history and theory. Charge and counter-charge of hegemonic or imperialist intentions on the part of semiotics have been levelled since structuralism's interventions in the field of the visual. The painting of the American artist Barnet Newman became a source of interest for Lyotard; Newman, a highly literate artist, wrote an essay in 1948 titled 'The sublime is now', the immediate focus of Lyotard's attention.
