In 1785 an influential art critic published a virulent attack on the way art was being displayed at Vienna’s Belvedere. The curator there had taken the radical step of lining the pictures up in chronological order, grouping them according to schools and providing each with an informative label. This was an outrageous imposition. The critic pointed out that people do not go to art museums to be educated, but to be entertained and to cultivate their taste, and that can happen only when widely differing objects are hung cheek-by-jowl without regard to their historical or cultural context. The museum, he said, must be a fantasy world, a world of delight and imagination (and, although he didn’t say so, one that successfully keeps the riff-raff at bay).¹

Well, he certainly lost that argument.