This article keeps name-checking other works without ever actually explaining why they’re being referenced in the first place. This is where I got fed up with i

This article keeps name-checking other works without ever actually explaining why they’re being referenced in the first place. This is where I got fed up with it: > Following Stephen Dedalus’s theory of art in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Martel draws a sharp distinction between art and artifice, and breaks down artifice into two categories. At one end of the continuum are advertising and pornography—works engineered to create desire for the thing one sees—and at the other end are propaganda and rhetoric—works engineered to inflame people’s emotions and to steer them toward acting or thinking or voting a certain way. Okay but who is that and why do we care - and crucially, at which ends of that continuum lie Art and Artifice respectively? Is art pornography? Is artifice propaganda? Or vice versa? Does it even make sense to place pornography and propaganda on opposite ends of a spectrum? Who cares, the article doesn’t explain and has already moved on to whatever’s next. > Martel tells us that, according to Joyce This is so unsatisfying. tell me what you mean, don’t just reference things at me!