ABSTRACT
The hero of Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno remarks that ‘Accountants are by nature a race of animals much inclined to irony.’ The informed gallery visitor or concert-goer knows how much in a still life or a sonata may be art or music criticism and therefore may be ironic. As scepticism presupposes credulity, so irony needs ‘alazony’, which is Greek for braggartism but in works on irony is shorthand for any form of self-assurance or naivety. Art is acceptably non-ironic when the appeal is simplest, most immediate and most absorbing, whether by approaching the aesthetic opacity of pure sensuousness or pure form, or by approaching the aesthetic transparency of the purely sublime. An intelligent man has the choice to be either ironical or radical.
