Pour une belle vue, v'la une belle vue!... 1847

This lithograph by Honoré Daumier shows two bourgeois men with a spyglass, a popular instrument in the 19th century, used to observe distant scenes. The spyglass itself becomes a symbol of detached observation, a way to scrutinize the world from a safe distance, much like the detached intellectual. The act of looking through a lens has historical echoes. Renaissance painters used the camera obscura to capture reality with precision. Think of Vermeer, the way he captured light and space. This tool, much like the spyglass, was used to dissect and analyze the world, turning it into a spectacle. But while Vermeer sought to understand, Daumier critiques the act of looking. The spyglass transforms its user into a voyeur, and the landscape into a mere spectacle, devoid of emotional connection. It speaks to a psychological need to control and understand one's environment. But as history shows, this tool has become an extension of the human desire to dissect and categorize, to impose order onto the chaos of existence. A desire that, like a snake eating its own tail, is ultimately self-defeating.