Welcome to the Lonely Pallet Reed. 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 Wolf. 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."

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 psycho analysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium, namely the seemingly innocuous

obiter dicta, the words in passing that give the game away. What I saw before me was the critic and chief of the New York Times saying,

in looking at a painting today, quote,

to lack a pervasive theory is to lack something crucial, end quote.

...