ABSTRACT
Art today is distributed in a net-work of communications more complex though not totally different in kind from the preceding five hundred years. Distinctive facts are 1) the mobility of the audience and of works of art (the case of the travelling Pietà) and 2) the visual explosion (reproductions that range from schematic sign to facsimile). This situation of movement and of plenty has its opponents who attack the big audience, even before the network that carries art to it has been adequately described. Galleries, museums, books, magazines, biennal exhibitions, make a co-ordinated and intricate apparatus through which art, reproductions of art, and writing about art, circulate.
