Did you mean "Pi electrons"?

Davis writes, "I do not want to deny replicatoriness and summativeness as the art-historicity of artworks"(35). Maybe I should have checked the Merriam-Davis edition, but my dictionary doesn't have "replicatoriness" or "summativeness," and my spellcheck is already disgruntled. I counted five "art-historicity"s in one page, including one "non-art-historicity," with no definition of the term. After reading the one-hundredth use of the word, I may be further from understanding its meaning than I was at the start. Substituting "historical authenticity" or its plural doesn't always seem to work, and the context, rich in coined terms, -ness, and -icity, isn't helping me to surmise Davis' meaning.

Davis must have a thorough understanding of the subject matter, and from the pieces of the article that I could decipher, it's an interesting topic. I want to be able to explore the themes here, and the problems raised by attempting to superimpose a discrete numbering system (Figure 1, Figure 2... ) on the continuous creation of a palimpsest. I can't get to these ideas before being tripped up by terms like pre-pre-art-historicity, (which, if it is a whole, is of course separate from non-pre-pre-art-historicity).

In mathematics, it is easier to start by understanding and using numbers before defining real numbers in terms of sets and Dedekind cuts. Here the issue of defining art history and its origins seems so hopelessly complex that I don't see how there could be a solution, let alone how I could grasp the definition without first being comfortable with art and art history in more simplified terms. I just hope that later in the semester I can return to this article and understand more of Davis' writing, maybe with a shared language, but for now I feel like I'm facing the confusion of tongues, and my response is crumbling like the abandoned tower of Babel.