EN
In his essay The Beau and the Beast (On the Traces of the Invisible Hand of the Market) Grzgorz Olszański attempts to describe the position of a contemporary writer in the free-market environment. However, the author analyses neither the readership statistics nor sales data or bestsellers lists, but the evolution of the writer’s image. Following Roland Barthes’s (the author of Mythologies) footsteps – Olszański carefully analyses a photographic portrait of Michał Witkowski, first published in the Polish weekly Viva!. On that basis the author reconstructs various models or writer’s representations, the photograph’s (Rafał Milach’s) fickle play with different artistic myths, and the pressure under which the writer is put, if he wants to be one of the heroes of pop-culture.