A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.

Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.

Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.

There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.