Realism tracks being inside a scene, not viewing it from outside

Evidence

Hockney said that the viewer in the Watteau picture is an alienated voyeur who may as well be looking through a keyhole. In the Picasso painting, however, we are in the room with her. For Hockney, this made the Picasso piece the more realistic of the two, since “[w]e do not look at the world from a distance; we are in it, and that’s how we feel.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 357

Categorization

• DEFINE: Odell redefines ‘realistic’ along Hockney’s lines: not mimetic fidelity but embodied inclusion — a key move in her argument that attention is constitution, not reception.
• XREF: connects to: Every object appears against an undifferentiated ground and in a chosen but given perspective