You'll revel in these and dozens of other destructive intellectual acts like a Visigoth sacking Rome. You'll also learn how to get into all the toniest art openings, gobbling all the canapes you can eat, meeting girls, while your snide cannonades thunder around the room and the Hockneys and their ilk cringe. But even if you are not a born critic, ''The 19th-Century French Art Critics' Handbook'' will so inflame and engorge your critical vocabulary that the rabbits in the fields will implode from nervous hysteria at the very thud of your footfall. Order now and you will be spared a scathing denunciation of the best idea you ever had, with footnotes, a bibliography, an index and a very bad portrait. While you strain to grasp the preceding sentence, take this simple if not utterly specious 60-second aptitude test.
Time is up.
If the space provided was sufficient for all the venom you can secrete, go away. You lack the faintest potential for a career as an authentic critical assassin. We haven't got all day. If your critical instincts even remotely approached your narcissism, you would know that 19th-century French art critics would stoop to any low trick or cunning trap. The above exercise was just such a one.