Art Encyclopedia - Literary Art

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Literary Art
Literary art is art that relies largely on word or text association for its full realisation. It is an adjunct that is not always visual, for example, where a narrative overcomes the visual, formal matters. Literary art relies heavily on subject matter and the use of symbols that require verbal knowledge and interpretation before the work communicates itself.

Literary sculpture is also mainly occupied with ideas, in contrast to an involvement with the formal qualities inherent in sculpture, namely the visual qualities such as composition and depth. Nineteenth-century academic sculpture became almost purely literary. The extreme opposite of literary sculpture is abstract sculpture, which seeks to eliminate all literary, anecdotal or philisophical attributes from sculpture, and concentrates on the puerly visual arrangement of forms in space.