Oscar Wilde – self-styled apostle of aestheticism – announced in 1891 that “They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.” A refulgent communion is invoked, in which (we may infer) semiotics is not merely defeated by art's very being, but lies prostrate and languid in the dust. Even to discuss the V&A's temporary exhibition, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, seems a sort of intimate cultural outrage, like noisily unwrapping a toffee during one of Pinter's pauses. Yet there's no getting round the fact that, for many, the exhibition's first, incongruous impression will be the reproductions of Frederic Leighton's Pavonia (1859) which are plastered over London's red buses, a study in peacock feathers and successful publicity. The exhibition's lure lies as much in its surprising disparities as in the beauty so stridently professed by aesthetes like Wilde: it unites heterogeneous elements into a grand curiosity shop of Victorian fine art and ( ...