Its true. You could do a talk on primitive art influence in modernist sculpture and find African tribal art, and cave painting from france so implicitly could do a talk on African tribal art, but without reference to south America or Asia or Inuit art, it was plainly incapable of doing a wide ranging talk on folk art in pre modern times.

You could do a talk on images of x in medium y, but only indirectly do a talk on x itself and no context not captured in images of x in medium y. Thats a fundamental limit.

If however there was no index to x in y, it relied on personal knowledge x in y existed. So there was a lot of path casting inside her head, to recall states to determine if the effort of an exhaustive search was justified.

Isn't that true of any pre index scheme?

thanks for sharing