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In defining fiction as language "used not seriously", JL Austin - in his early -1950s lectures "How To Do Things With Words' - may appear to have been derogating art, but he could as Well have been providing a measure by which to protect it from being instrumentalised, in a spirit similar to WH Auden's line "For poetry makes nothing happen', which, I would argue, is a definition of artistic freedom, rather than a hobbling of it by resigning its powers. Richard Prince might have been testing art's ability to neutralise this form of action by assuming a critical or aesthetic remove from it, when, in 1983, he re-photographed a commercial photographer's soft-porn image of a ten-year-old Brooke Shields, and sardonically titled it Spiritual America. The coincidence between the technologies of picturing and seeing (eye = pinhole camera/telescope) that emerged in the early modern period reappears, with image-making as the sharp end of a global online culture's erosion of a sense of 'the other'. After publishing the novel Madame Bovary in 1856, for which he was litigated against for treating a subject too close to home too literally, Gustave Flaubert turned his attention, in Salammbô, to ancient Carthage - a subject he calculated no one cared enough about to object to.