Welcome to the Lonely Pallet Reeds, an oral dive into classic works of art historical literature that never seemed interesting until they were read out loud to you, and you realize that gossip is gossip in every century.

Today, the introduction to the painted word by Tom Wolfe.

People don't read the morning newspaper, Marshall McLuhan once said. They slip into it like a warm bath.

Too true, Marshall. Imagine being in New York City on the morning of Sunday, April 28th, 1974, like I was,

slipping into that great public bath, that vat, that spa, that regional physiotherapy tank, that white sulfur springs, that Marion Bad, that Ganges, that River

Jordan for a million souls, which is the Sunday New York Times. Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing.

In Arts and Leisure, Section 2, page 19, in a state of perfect sensory deprivation,

when all at once an extraordinary thing happened.

I noticed something. Yet another clam broth-colored current had

begun to roll over me, as warm and predictable as the Gulf Stream. A review, it was, by the

Times Dean of the Arts, Hilton Kramer, of an exhibition at Yale University of seven realists, seven realistic painters,

when I was jerked alert by the following.

Quote,

Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a pervasive theory,

and given the nature of our intellectual

commerce with the work of art, to lack a pervasive theory is to lack something crucial,

the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the

values they signify, end quote. Now you may say, my God, man, you woke up over

that? You forsook your blissful coma over a mere swell in a sea of words? But I knew what I was

looking at. I realized that without making the slightest effort, I had come upon one of those utterances

in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or Belgrade

press are willing to endure a lifetime of TDM, namely the seemingly innocuous,

...