“If images don’t do anything in this culture, if they haven’t done anything, then why are we sitting here in the twilight of the twentieth century talking about them?  And if they only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing them, we are.  Therefore, if our criticism aspires to anything beyond soft-science, the efficacy of images must be the cause of criticism, and not its consequence -- the subject of criticism and not its object.  And this is why I direct your attention to the language of visual affect -- to the rhetoric of how things look -- to the iconography of desire -- in a word, to beauty!”

Dave Hickey (critic, former editor of Art in America, and professor of art history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas) “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty”