Back to the library and book analogy for a second: Say you were doing research and you picked up a book to find that it had a confusing table of contents or none at all. Would you continue to try to find what you need or move on to a different book?
Many artists are opposed to having a lot of text on their site. They want their work to speak for itself. However, text is still an important aspect of communicating information about who you are and what you have to say. A little information about you as an artist, the way you work, and what inspires you can create a connection with a user. The vast majority of art books out there include written text about the subject. Your site should be no different. The reality is that the written word about art is often times at least as important and valuable to a piece of artwork as the artwork itself. People want to know what you and others have to say about your work.
Make your site more usable by keeping large images to a minimum. That huge background image behind your site may look cool, but if a site takes more than a couple of seconds to load, you just lost more possible users. Using one or a few important images on your homepage, or maybe even a flash image slide show, without having them dominating the entire site will translate better for users.
Think about what you want people to see about your site right away. If you have a certain element that takes priority, be sure it is above the fold on your site so that it is more readily visible to viewers and more predominately ranked with the search engines. Things that appear on the homepage of your site above the fold are the same as a book cover and people really do judge a book by its cover regardless of what they claim.
Let's talk about search engines. They are the number one way people find online resources. If you create a site the search engines can't see, you just cut out a whole lot of your audience. I talked earlier about the importance of text on a site and I will reiterate it here: Text will help you get more attention. Images are not visible to search engines, so if someone happens to be searching for work that is exactly like yours, but you have no text on your site that talks about it, they will have a lot harder time finding your site. This goes for navigation as well, so make sure you use text rather than images for the navigation of your site.
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