Robert Hughes gives Salvador Dali -- the early model, anyway -- a careful re-think: "He understood theatrical perspective and knew exactly how to paint every crumb in a loaf of bread or every pore in the skin of a human back until the image seemed so glutted with reality that it might explode, like a bomb."

Pure Hughes. To me, he's the best art writer in the world; maybe the best critic, but that's not my turf. His recent book on Goya -- a review of which I've been preparing for, what? A month now? -- is absolutely fantastic: personal, impassioned, knowledgeable, and written the way the author talks, with all the conversational elegance of his PBS specials. He's a great viewer, a great noticer; he has the great gift of making people see. Get it, read it, absorb it.