We'll be fine’, Pierre-Auguste Renoir said assertively. ‘We are good artist; we know that. Remember what Baudelaire said before he died: "Nothing can be done except little by little." That is what we are doing, it is not big, but it is something!

Picasso is said to have once mused that it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.

It is weird when one of those copies is put out on the display to observe people taking the thing so seriously. You see hordes of unsmiling art-worshippers craning their heads around the object, staring at it for ages, standing back, looking at it from all angles. It’s a urinal! It’s not even the original. The art is in the idea, not the object.