Troubling and gorgeous, this essay on "the status of the fine arts at the end of the twentieth century" was commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Launching a stinging attack on Christian Boltanski's use of Holocaust imagery in his artworks, Godard and Miéville rummage through centuries of art and philosophy-Bergson and Bresson, Beauvoir and Borges are invoked-to fashion a sad meditation on lost culture, lost illusions, lost ideals.