Martin Gayford

Duke Ellington once said that, in the future, no one would be able to retain his or her identity. He meant culturally not personally.

Rachel Whiteread hasn’t moved on in two decades. For “Detached,” her exhibition of sculpture at the Gagosian Gallery in London, she is doing exactly the same thing as when she first came to fame with “House” in 1993. She is still making casts of the internal space of structures.

Vincent van Gogh once said that he could sit in front of Rembrandt’s “Jewish Bride” in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for a fortnight with just a crust of bread to eat.

“Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum” at London’s British Museum is an exhibition that immerses you in the ancient world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked that there are no second acts in American lives.

On February 17, 1901, a young Spanish poet and close friend of Pablo Picasso’s named Carles Casagemas invited several people to a Paris restaurant. After dinner he pulled out a gun, fired at one of his guests -- a model with whom he was in love -- then, having missed her, shot himself.

Federico Barocci had his life transformed by a poisoned salad. He was fed this dish at a picnic in Rome in the 1560s, and never quite recovered.

Like many revolutionaries, the late Roy Lichtenstein was at heart a bit of a conservative.

It was impossible to be a Dadaist in New York, Man Ray believed, because the city itself was the epitome of manic, anarchic Dada.

The more history unfolds, the less the description “Homo sapiens” -- man the wise -- seems to fit. Perhaps we should speak instead of Homo pictor, man the painter, or of human beings as the sculpting species.

If you think that avant-garde art is ponderous and austere, think again.

This is a rubbish exhibition.