Abstract
Take the most looked-at artifact in history, a specific oil painting, and assume that the entire response to it (including all the controversy surrounding it) constitutes and symptomatizes a single, ideologically determined view. Then take the most significant modern representative of the refusal to look (except in passing) at cultural artifacts generally and at painting in particular. Require this exemplary nonviewer to see that exemplary work. Now consider ex hypothesi, as artifact, Velazquez's painting known as Las Meninas and, as nonviewer, Lenin. What has the consensus looked at, what can Lenin see, and how do these two visual activities relate to one another now, at our moment of late capitalist hegemony?
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