(link)
"Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot. The handcrafted simplicity creating a directness of intention that art is forbidden. Artists' private esteem for the simple, functional object. These objects against which art feels inconsequential, inadequate against an elemental usefulness."
Beery toys with this functionality, a slight haywire version sparking in the walls, threatening to burn the whole thing, meaning, down. The trueness of statements, their ability to make sense, becomes if not beside the point, a thing to torture. Not the treachery of images, but the treachery of saying anything at all.