… when Oscar Wilde announced ‘Nobody of any real culture talks about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned,’ sunsets reeled under the blow, then recovered. Les beaux-arts, when summoned to a similar call to be up-to-date, did not. The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.