According to Wallace Sabine, who basically invented the science of aural architecture (how to create and control sonic spaces within buildings), the design of the Cathedral Girgenti in Sicily is such that the confessional box is acoustically connected to a far corner of the church. Thus, a whispered confession can be heard clearly and without witnesses by anyone familiar with the church's design. This has been called a coincidence.

Discovered in Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?
Experiencing Aural Architecture, Blesser and Salter (54)

To revolutionize science, Wallace Sabine spent hours in Harvard's Fogg Art museum late at night (to minimize street noise), playing an organ (to create a sonic event), then listening and counting the seconds until his ear (a highly tuned and scientific instrument) registered silence. He always wore the same "blue winter coat and vest, winter trousers, thin underwear, high shoes," once he discovered the fabric of his clothes affected the results by absorbing sound. Picture him there, still as the Buddha in his dirty clothes, the organ pipe's 512 cycles per second pitch fading as a torsion pendulum silently measures every hundredth second, [tick-tick-tick]. 

The Soundscapes of Modernity, Emily Thompson (Sabine and his "thin underwear" qtd. in Thompson 36)

"Art is the inevitable consequence of growth and is the manifestation of the principles of its origin. The work of art is a result; is the output of a progress in development and stands as a record and marks the degree of development. It is not an end in itself..."

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

"The desire to know everything...is a sign of love. It is also a sign of reading. And a sign of excess. And so, reading sometimes demands the contrary sign of looking away, of stopping short, of realizing that texts, like persons, cannot entirely be known, that they must keep some of their secrets"

Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics

...

"A dog if you point at something, will only look at your finger"

David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram"

In this essay, Wallace argues that the lure of television seems voyeuristic, but, in fact, voyeurism is based on the erotic feeling that the person you are watching, going about their little tasks, does not know you are invading their world. Television, while seeming one way, in fact presents us with actors whose job is to know they are being watched all the time, and to, in turn, "act natural." For Wallace, this means that young writers who watch television as if it were voyeurism, looking for characters and worlds to populate their fiction, end up writing fiction from fiction. The "finger" reference above, turns these writers (and perhaps us) into the dog. We no longer look at what television refers to--"the real world"--we just look at the signal: the image on the tube. However, Wallace goes further. He describes the way in which television is so full of self references that it is no longer a question of whether or not it does/doesn't actually reflect reality. In other words, the finger is no longer even pointing at anything except itself. Television no longer even asserts some outside world. For Wallace, it has become full of its own in-jokes, its own set of characters from one show playing characters from another show, one show's images reflecting another show's. Thus, for Wallace, television has become like Jameson's Bonaventure Hotel, a complete system no longer registering the existence of the rest of the city.