All of these things can take mere "commentary" or "evidence" and make it exist for the audience in ways they had never considered before.
The new approach enlisted his considerable erudition (the Dissertations cites over two hundred sources) – in a transitional culture where a reputation for being learned remained important – while avoiding mere commentary or appeal to intellectual authority, procedures which he explicitly dismissed.
Even then it is easy to see his talent for composition and as one absorbs his work, especially his market and village scenes for which he is famous, the technical proficiency his work displays, his excellent craftsmanship, lifts his work out of mere social commentary or ordinary landscape painting into a higher realm, something both real and spiritually uplifting.
But it is also, actually, spellbinding: "so strange and startlingly smart," Alice Gregory wrote, in the Times, "that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction".
Volume 4 of the catalog, a mere 80 pages, provides helpful commentary on the photographs.
And to think, just a few years ago if you wanted to follow March Madness online you'd have to be content with mere text play-by-play commentary.
(Who looks to tweets for mature critical commentary anyway?)But these are mere quibbles on what is otherwise a day of celebration.
Their profiles changing with the merest gust of wind, mobiles were nice commentaries on spatial relationships and the play of light, possibly even commentaries on the evanescent nature of experience itself.
No mere weather story, it combined meticulous detail, social commentary and references to art and literature — all rendered in spectacularly overwrought prose.
By massing colours into abstract blocks rather than striving after mere mimesis, the artist offers a self-conscious commentary on the possibilities and limits of watercolour.
