breaking of the glass in 1926 was suddenly to reveal that he could not take power over the physical world in this way. The revelation was not exactly the dispelling of an illusion, but rather the physical thing reclaimed from Duchamp, the cracks and splints of glass reclaiming the reality of sensate ­experience beyond the stratagems of the maker. In the same way Manet’s mirror recovers the reality of those bottles and fruits on the bar which, seen in themselves, without the work of displacement, are ghost objects of no retinal reality.

o re-envision others and oneself as concrete, particular human beings rather than as cultural types, may also depend upon such unexpected turns: not the destruction of frames of reference but rather something like their cracking. That unexpected turn, that displacement, is what makes it possible for a foreigner to become a Russian somewhere else, and for a work of modern art to become modern.