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In the Moderna Museet in Stockholm there is a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch, which references Chekhov’s famous story ‘Lady with a Dog’. It was part of a Jeff Koons mini-show. At the time (2014), I thought it was by Koons. The postcard disabused me. It shows a woman in unapologetic Barbara Cartland pink, with a parasol, accompanied by a white fighting Pekinese. Both are constructed entirely from shells — she mainly scallop shells, her ample bust the bulging hinge of a clam, her arms fashioned from auger shells like mini-whelks. We have seen this ‘art’ before in a thousand evening classes for housewives who couldn’t get into the over-subscribed flower-arranging or macramé.

It is the dog that makes the sculpture remarkable: it is an exact, pitch-perfect arrangement of a very few clam shells to capture the proud carriage, the bonsai bearing, the absurd chutzpah, the top-dog self-confidence. Like Koons’s balloon dog, it teleports a vulgar representation from the vernacular into the palace of art — a commoner into the royal family. It is a branch of pop art, a branch Alexander Calder might be said to have pioneered in his ‘Cirque Calder’ (1926–31), which took the greatest show on earth and raised its status by prodigal invention. Think of Calder’s wire sword swallower slightly bent forward at the waist as he gags on the sword whose hilt fills his mouth. The piquant, puking accuracy is all in the posture. What is now accepted was, in Calder’s day, slightly dubious, lacking the gravitas of great art. In his autobiography, Calder records the verdict of a patron as he patiently packed up his circus into its suitcases: ‘Mrs Bernstein said, “It’s a lot of work.” That was her only comment.’