Art of course survives on the walls of private dwellings and corporate offices, but it 'dies' in the sense of losing its public, community-gathering, world-historical significance.

In aesthetic consciousness we enter that painless state, prized by Epicurus as the state of the gods for a moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the will. We celebrate the Sabbath from the penal servitude of willing the wheel of Ixion stands still.

The brain, Schopenhauer says, is the 'one great tool' that has enabled a creature endowed with neither sharp teeth nor claws to survive in a competitive environment. Moreover simplification of data, and indeed judicious falsification, are adaptive traits.