"... has been some what derogatory in the context of art, because an illustration, as an image inspired by a text, implies an easy reliance on a source outside the artistic imagination. Like the equally pejorative "decorative", "illustrative" also connotes a graphically lively, colourful kind of drawing produced for commercial purposes or entertainment. Above all, an illustration is readable, suggesting a lack of discursive complexity that has in the past sealed its banishment from the fine-art discourse. If the literary equivalent of the drawing might be the lyric poem, illustration finds it's analogy in something closer to the ground: the narrative folktale, repository for the stock characters and the social and moral conventions of vernacular culture." - (2002). Popular Culture and National Culture. In Drawing Now: eight propositions (p. 104). New york: The Museum of Modern Art.
