All of us have interests from which we derive pleasure, but which we know are beyond the scope of our talents and abilities. Pleasure can, in fact, be intensified knowing that a given individual possesses skills beyond our immediate ken. Few people in the crowds that recently hunkered down at the local pub to watch the World Cup finals claim to be the equal at soccer of a Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé; still, that didn’t forestall their enthusiasm or admiration. Attendees of the Metropolitan Opera or, for that matter, the Grand Ole Opry are there to relish and, perhaps, stand in awe of performances that are beyond the ordinary. As someone who enjoys movie musicals, I marvel at how the Nicholas Brothers dance as if gravity had no purchase on them. Still, I don’t kid myself: tripping is my forte, not tripping the light fantastic. Best-faith efforts are limited—should be limited, actually—by a degree of realism.

This is not to suggest that artists shouldn’t have ambitions. World art would be considerably poorer without those individuals who had the chutzpah to take on precedent. A few years back, the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, Greece, mounted “Picasso and Antiquity: Line and Clay,” an exhibition in which artifacts from antiquity were juxtaposed with related drawings, paintings, and ceramics by the Spanish modernist. The mercy of that exhibition