Blake Gopnik argues that the addition of words almost never helps a piece of art or architecture. “In my work as an art critic, I often come across this imbalance between word and image. It’s almost never put there by the artists themselves, when they’re any good; it almost always comes when someone doesn’t believe that art can work without the help of text. When museums don’t really believe in the communicative power of a piece of art, however great and famous, they throw up words that are supposed to make it speak. The strange thing about the World War II memorial, I’d say, is that even the designers of this work of art don’t trust it to communicate alone.”