The story of sculpture I have been telling has a kind of ending, though not one that resolves the obsessions circulating round the sculptural object that have been the central theme of this book. Sculpture is neither finished nor has it completely shed the conventions that once gave it its special, uneasy status in relation to painting. Over recent years, a new form of three-dimensional art has brought to an end the subordination of sculpture to painting, and opened up a more theatricalised …