They tell her audience whom it is safe to admire. Real history is much more complex. Manet, for example, was both challenging the presuppositions of art history and admiring the tradition greatly. The paradox of such an appropriation itself creates meaning, and it lies at the heart of Modernism. The ironies of tradition cannot be captured in her formula of reference, deference, and difference .
Artists beg to differ out of their love.
They refer in order to create the difference. They defer where it allows the image, the referent, to live and breathe. Pollock denies that she is playing the same game, that she ever hoped to defer to or differ from her audience. The reader knows better. Every page of her text breathes that vocabulary.