Spectatordom

He was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.

Most important, Manet seems intuitively to have recognized that Courbet’s attempt to abolish the very possibility of spectatordom was doomed in every instance to (ontological not artistic) failure, or at any rate that success in that attempt was literally inconceivable, and that it was necessary to establish the beholder’s presence abstractly—to build into the painting the separateness, distancedness, and mutual facing that I have associated with the painting-beholder relationship in its traditional or unreconstructed form—in order that the worst consequences of theatricalization of that relationship be averted.

He considers spectatordom as the fundamental condition ordering social life, but the state of being he characterizes as theatrical must always be staged in a nontheatrical mental field that much more closely resembles the transparency of the realist novel than the non-narrative fictions of theater.