literary artists. For better or worse, literature is intimately bound by the limitations of language. The effect of a writer's words - poet, novelist, historian - can only be approximated in translation. This is not to denigrate Mexican literature - Fuentes' 1954 collection of surrealist short stories, Los dias enmascarados (The Masked Days), travels well and offers insight into the Mexican worldview, for example - still, it is the constant frustration of the reader of any translation to live with the knowledge that nuance and cultural subtext as art are oftentimes impossible to extricate from the context of the original language.
Visual art, by contrast, succeeds or fails because of its direct communication with the viewer. A dedicated art critic might disagree with this statement, pointing to the need to understand the often-complex "coding" written into a painting or a piece of sculpture. This is certainly true in terms of appreciating a "classic" work to its fullest: to understand that a Dutch still-life of a fruit bowl, one lemon slightly rotting, represents the transitory nature of life in the flesh, as opposed to the undying nature of the soul - this is to comprehend the full Protestant message contained in a seemingly "pretty" picture (De La Croix 797). By the same token, what makes one particular still life remain vivid in the public imagination centuries later and continents distant is the transcendent communication of the work of art itself, divorced from immediate context. This is the underlying purpose of contemporary explorations into different forms of "abstract" art.
As if in anticipation of our shrinking world, the global sphere drawn ever-tighter by the bands of international communications, the movement of 20th Century art has been away from specific contexts and towards a neutral (or broad) canvas in which the viewer is left to "understand" the creative work personally and directly - or not at all....