Is there a concise name for that mental or psychological phenomenon that's evoked by René Magritte's famous picture "The Treachery of Images"? The anger at feeling betrayed by an image somehow?
If the reader isn't aware of this rather famous oil painting, the Wikipedia article is sufficiently informative. This is the notorious "this is not a pipe" picture that apparently gets certain people very angry, because it's a flippant reminder that objects and pictures of objects are distinct.
Why would that make anyone angry? It's an objective truth, isn't it? Magritte put it succinctly: can you stuff tobacco into his picture? Of course not. I'm reminded of the legend about how Pythagoras (or one of his followers) supposedly killed the man who proved that the square root of two was an irrational number, impossible to express as a ratio of two whole numbers. The legend is almost certainly apocryphal but it's all too credible: defeat someone with "facts and logic" and they might simply murder you rather than admit that they were out-reasoned. Arguably this is the root principle of authoritarianism as an intellectual proposition: superior force always "wins" arguments of any sort, logical or not.
But where does the anger even come from? That's the puzzling thing. I suppose one could assert that there's supposed to be an implicit bargain between artist and audience: "I, the artist, am giving you a necessarily incomplete depiction of a real thing, and you are accepting this representation as being in some sense a truthful depiction of reality." The "willing suspension of disbelief", the unconscious or semi-conscious decision by the audience to disregard the vast difference in physical reality between an artistic image and what it represents, might be regarded as a consequence of this implicit bargain. If such a tacit agreement exists, then I suppose one could say that Magritte was thumbing his nose at it, but why is that a problem?
I suggest that there's an underlying issue here: an inability to conceive of abstractions. Why would you be offended by being reminded that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe, unless your mind had some genuine difficulty with discriminating between a physical image of a pipe and the unseen, intangible, but still real smoking-pipe that furnished Magritte with his artistic model? (Maybe Magritte painted a pipe from memory or a magazine photograph or something else, but all the same, there must have been an actual pipe involved somewhere in the cascade of events.)
~Chara (where was I even going with this)
