There is an old vaudeville routine, in which a comedian dons a
succession of scary masks. As he puts each one on, he taps the
shoulder of a man standing in front of him; when the man turns
round, he is not in the least shocked, only irritated. Finally
the comedian gives up, gets out a cigarette, and taps the man on
the shoulder to ask him for a light. The man turns round, takes
one look at the comedian’s real face and cries out in terror.

I had a comparable experience in the run-up to Apocalypse, a
new show at the Royal Academy. It was billed as shocking and
controversial, but as I read accounts of its star exhibits and
saw pictures of them, I felt strangely unmoved. An effigy of the
present Pope lying on the ground, felled by a meteorite? Uh-huh. A
giant dog kneaded out of balloons by Jeff Koons? Not him again! A
reconstruction of a bus shelter outside Auschwitz? The kind of
thing, given some other recent exhibitions, that you’ve almost
come to expect. A film of a man beating up a woman and having sex
with her? No big deal, even if it was made by someone who had
also produced music videos for Madonna.

And then I saw a newspaper picture of Norman Rosenthal, who
organized the show, and I momentarily lost my composure. It
wasn’t so much Rosenthal’s smiling features as the fact that he
had been photographed