The Guillotine: Twentieth-Century Classics That Won't Last No 50: The Guillotine

So here it finally is, No 50, just a few days away from the millennial deadline. And what could be more appropriate for this, the last of the series, than to have the Guillotine guillotine itself, like a serpent swallowing its own tail. A new century is almost upon us, but this column, perhaps fortunately, won't be around to take note of just how mortifyingly few of its predictions come to pass.

In any event, posterity will not settle its accounts at once or even, I imagine, all that swiftly. It's one of several fin-de-siecle paradoxes that, in a period of ever more vertiginous speed and innovation, it will probably take considerably longer than in the past for the artists of the ebbing 20th century to face their judgement day. What with the massive expansion of paperback publication, what with the internet, television, video, DVDs, CDs and the like, even some potentially doomed oeuvre is nevertheless likely to enjoy a spectral semi-survival well into the new millennium.

Have I any retrospective regrets? Second thoughts? Artists to whom I would now offer a last-minute reprieve? Two women, above all. Gertrude Stein, whose work, I've lately come to realise, is utterly transformed by being read aloud. And Karen Blixen: given her indisputable brilliance, my argument, that her style was already passeist for the 20th century and would hence be doubly so for the 21st, now strikes me as ingeniously but implausibly sophistical. As in one of those "Test Your Weight" machines which used to be found in country funfairs, her writing consistently rings the bell.

In fact, and in the spirit of the season, I wish (nearly) all of my subjects well in the coming century and sincerely hope that (nearly) all of them will prove me wrong. For I recall one of the most poignant pleas in the history of the last millennium. It was made, when on the point of being beheaded, by one of the aristocratic victims of the French Revolution. "Encore un petit instant, monsieur le bourreau!" she cried. Or "Just a moment longer, Mr Executioner!" Even on the scaffold, she wanted to breathe in more of God's good air. Even in the shadow of the guillotine, even for a work of art, it's better to be alive than dead.