Art and critics must ask how every understanding of reality requires fictions. Criticism gets in trouble only once it confuses seeing through lies and living without the stories people tell themselves . Not every transparent object is empty. Style as an event Masaccio or Titian created an explosion. Style silences the explosions as it recovers decoration and fantasy, from Lippi's architecture to Lotto's carpets.
Lesser figures turn a news event into a social event.
A revolution projects feelings every which way like a schizophrenic. Style gathers them in, like a party or a dream. Style becomes a means of defining oneself by escaping the self, like Mary escaping her future and giving birth to it. Modernity allowed them both and made them inseparable. This New Yorker really does love art but suspect New Yorker cartoons, wonder at astronomy but wonder about America.