The Victorian household never had it so good. I've been there before. Hickey's belief rests on the viewer's ability to construct new meanings. With that freedom, he argues not unlike the Existentialists, comes anxiety. On the one hand, he again has it wrong.
Criticism makes no excuse for relativism.
Sure, it describes a world of created meanings, but meanings created together with history, institutions, and a work's creator. Hickey imagines each person making meaning at will, apart from an inherited world, a world that people, now and again, call natural. His image is self-refuting. It places people outside of created meanings. At the same time, it argues that nothing else can exist.