I shouldn’t be annoyed by it, but I am

Every other week, the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal contains a column by Amanda Foreman titled “Historically Speaking” in which she writes on history, culture, and world affairs. This past weekend (August 27-28, 2016), the column, “When Works of Art Come Apart”, focused on the vulnerability of works of art to a number of things, primarily inherent vice. Foreman details the problems of specific works from Leonardo’s Last Supper to Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (his preserved shark). This is good and informative. The last line of the piece, “There’s a moral in all this, somewhere”–almost a throwaway— seems to belittle all that came before it. I shouldn’t be annoyed by it, but I am.