This article began its life as a book review—but a chapter towards the end of Edmund Capon’s book (titled I Blame Duchamp) about the vicissitudes of art museums blew it off course, and prompted some musings on Capon’s staggering thirty-year tenure at the Art Gallery of New South Wales—nearly seven of which I was able to observe at first hand. Capon arrived in Sydney in November 1978 to take up the director’s reins at the AGNSW, yet Sydney was always intended as a launching pad for his career, not a final splashdown. Ten years later, when he narrowly missed being…