"Art must be a comment; otherwise, it is propaganda."

Harald Szeemann

In his book “The Supermarket of the Visible”, philosopher and musicologist Peter Szendy listens to what, as early as 1929, Walter Benjamin described as a space filled 100% with images. In other words, that saturated visibility which today reaches us from all sides, surrounds us and penetrates us, and even investigates our slightest ocular spasms. The number of images is growing so exponentially – nowadays, more than three billion images are shared every day on social networks – that the space of visibility seems to be literally submerged. The image appears to us more and more as a frozen frame, that is, as a momentary crystallization, as the provisionally stabilized equilibrium of the speeds that constitute it.

The neologism “iconomy” captures Szendy's attempt to theorize how, according to him, our perception of images is shaped by the contemporary economic system: he argues that the economy of the image cannot be reduced to the funding system for the production of images, nor even to the broader economy of which its diffusion is a part: the presentation of a system of “general interchangeability”, where each image is an image-debt or an image-credit, and where the gaze is mediated by the mechanical and bodily modalities of circulation.

Georges Didi-Huberman states in his book “When Images Touch the Real” that "the image is more than just a simple cut made in the world of visible aspects. It is a trace, a footprint, a visual trace of the time that wanted to touch (...). It is ash mixed from various braziers, more or less hot. In this, then, the image burns. It burns for the desire that animates it, for the intentionality that structures it, for the enunciation, even the urgency that it manifests. (...) The image burns for memory, that is to say that it still burns when it is nothing more than ash: a way of expressing its essential vocation for survival, despite everything."