Flat Earth: Life irritates Art

MUSEUM attendants, although a splendid body of men and women in every other way, never seem to make quite the connection between art and life that you hope for. In Toledo, Ohio, recently a young woman was hustled out of the Art Museum by scandalised guards. Her crime? In a room filled with Rubens' goddesses, all triumphantly nude, she had sat in a corner to breastfeed her baby.

And in Russia they're even keener to hit the eject button. A friend of Flat Earth's, recently back from St Petersburg, reports that she was indignantly ejected from the Hermitage after she had paused in front of a painting and used its reflection to comb her hair. The fact that, by chance, the painting was of a woman combing her hair and was entitled 'Vanity' left the uniformed ones all unmoved.