Commentary Extravagant, exhibitionist futility often seems nowadays to be the primrose path to artistic fame. For example, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, one of the city’s great landmarks, has just been draped or wrapped in 25,000 square metres of polypropylene fabric, tied with red rope, for a few days, in accordance with the wishes, or ambitions, of the now-deceased “artists,” Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (Christo, as he was known) and his wife, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. This power couple succeeded during their lives in persuading authorities in many places to allow them to drape prominent buildings—for example, the Reichstag in Berlin—in similar fashion. Unfortunately, the polypropylene fabric they used to drape the Arc de Triomphe is recyclable, so that it could in theory be re-used to cover the Taj Mahal, say, or the Jefferson Memorial. To ask whether draping famous buildings and monuments in fabric is really art is to …