First Sentence

"Writing some two hundred and fifty years ago, at the dawn of the modern museum age, the painter Charles-Antoine Coypel objected to the use of the singular "public" to describe the crowds who flocked to the exhibitions of contemporary art in Paris held at the Louvre: In the Salon where the paintings are displayed, the public changes twenty times a day.... This place can offer twenty publics of different tone and character in the course of single day: a simple public at certain times, a prejudiced public, a flighty public, an envious public, a public slavish to fashion....A final accounting of these publics would lead to infinity."