58 OVERLOAD
PACKING AN ARTWORK WITH INFORMATION
A work of art can sometimes be made more compelling and engaging by increasing the amount and density of information it displays. Overloading an image, creating a surfeit of incident and interest, can be a spectacular but also a somewhat primitive strategy. Some early northern European art delighted in a great wealth of visual information, packing each part of a composition with dazzling rendering and elaborately crafted detail. Such artworks often suffer from the negative feature of overload—the lack of clarity that results from the absence of a clear hierarchy of importance within the image.
A number of modern artists have deployed a sense of overload as a positive strategy. The very quality of ...
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