Along with his or her audience, the review critic is a participant in a sort of collective vanity, the aim of which is to elevate said collective above the gross mass of television addicts (lowbrows) who can't be bothered with whatever is being reviewed, let alone the review itself. But once this hierarchy is made clear another two levels are made implicit: the critic is highbrow, while his or her audience is middlebrow. The subtlety of this relationship lies in the fact that each individual of the audience can be encouraged to feel that he or she is the only highbrow in this sorry group and that he or she is the only one in this group capable of engaging the critic on an intellectual plane and, furthermore, that between the two there is a nod and a wink exchanged at the expense of the rest of the audience.

The critic's function is, to a large extent, to engage in an unending series of duels. These are not fought with lowbrows - who can't be counted on to show up at the appointed place or time - and are only perfunctorily fought with middlebrows since those skirmishes are more like shooting fish in a barrel than actual dueling, the middlebrow's recourse to arms being pretty much limited to an occasional letter to the editor. The serious duels don't even take place between the critic and artists. The real battle of the brows is between the critic and other critics, and to a large extent the function of the artist - who is seen as an entity fixed on a scale running from idiot savant to idiot - is to serve as catalyst in these exercises in one-upmanship that are the soul of Western art analysis.