Artists are fond of attributing the sometimes disorienting effects they create to “the fragility of our senses,” as London’s Tate Gallery described the work of Mark Titchner, a nominee for the 2006 Turner Prize. But this is rubbish, because our senses aren’t fragile. “Fragility” is a description of the feeling of perception in certain situations, especially ones engineered to disorient, but it is not an explanation.
