It would be wrong to belittle the Rembrandt exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria because the emphasis is on etchings and drawings with a few paintings to highlight the majesty of the work. Rembrandt was one of the greatest artists (in any medium) the world has seen. And if you leaf through Simon Schama’s Rembrandt’s Eyes you will be arrested by the drawings and etchings which tingle with the felt life of an artist whose capacity for dramatic realisation touches everything he ever sketched. And, of course, Rembrandt’s effortless sense of drama always tends to be quiet. The greatest of the paintings have an astonishing authority which is in no way showy. Wasn’t it John Berger in The Success and Failure of Picasso who used the example of his wife as a depiction of love which had no element of histrionic voyeurism. He is opposite to another very great painter Caravaggio where the stab of eroticism and its histrionic delineation is what creates the fire of the maker of great art even though the paintings transcend the thing they flaunt.

Speaking of Picasso it’s interesting to see that Hannah Gadsby who uses a comedian’s technique to parade effects of unmitigated seriousness has co-curated a show called Pablomatic at the Brooklyn Museum which according to reports highlights the great painter’s dynamic and sometimes daemonic devotion to surging his way to a sometimes devastatingly erotic art as if painting had no greater purpose than to celebrate rampant sexuality of the most masculine kind. Well, the #MeToo world takes a significantly dimmer view of this than John Berger did in his very grand examination of the better and lesser Picasso, the painter who created and illuminated truth and the one who dramatised to spectacular effect his capacity to pleasure himself. But Berger was a critic who believed art was ultimately a moral thing, the position taken by that great novelist Henry James and the extraordinarily influential 20th century Cambridge literary critic, F.R. Leavis – but he was not a prude.

Hannah Gadsby – with her jokes from which laughter has been drained – was one of the people responsible for getting the Melbourne Comedy Festival to stop calling its award The Barry in honour of Barry Humphries. Perhaps it seems a short step if you can dethrone a great comedian to taking on the greatest painter of the 20th century. Gadsby’s anti-Barry move was because Humphries had written in support of the J.K. Rowling / TERF position on the trans issue.

It was fascinating to see the long doco, What Is A Woman, streamed on Twitter by Elon Musk with Matt Walsh sniffing round this issue. People who have grave doubts about the trans movement who watch it are likely to find themselves riveted by the strange phenomenon of propaganda on behalf of a cause in which they believe. Is it possible to have true propaganda? Well, think of Churchill’s wartime speeches and the armoury of rhetoric he brought to enunciating all that ‘We shall fight on the beaches, on the fields and on the landing grounds. We shall never surrender.’ Matt Walsh constantly and confrontingly tries to get pro-trans doctors to answer the question, what is a woman?, to the point where they say they won’t continue the conversation. He also finds allies – one in particular – who want to assert that the world has turned into a mosh pit of pleasure-seeking subjectivism ever since Kinsey. It’s hard to stop watching however. He talks to Jordan Peterson, he talks to every kind of player in the field. It does, however, make you want to pick up Jan Morris’ sane, in some ways reticent book, Conundrum. Sir Robin Day, the doyen of BBC interviewing, actually dared to ask Morris about her sex life but didn’t get an answer. She was furious. But it’s a reminder of the glory days of television fifty years ago. We’ve gone a long way from the days of Dick Cavett interviewing giants.

One of the staggering bits of talk television were the 1968 debates between Gore Vidal, the great liberal essayist and fiction maker, and William F. Buckley, the arch and artful conservative of the day. Vidal and Buckley were the most sparkling and savage gladiatorial duo in recent history. All of which makes it distinctly odd that Sharmill, the National Theatre Live distibutors, are showing Best of Enemies, in which David Harewood and Zachary Quinto (the Spock of the recent Star Trek films) as the respective right-wing and left-wing princes. And what princes they were. Anyone who saw Gore Vidal in 2003 read Dalton Trumbo’s letters on the New York stage will tell you his technique was equal to the very top level of actors. And Buckley was something like his antagonistic equal. Each of them was supremely articulate and they had accents which were vertiginously posh by any American standards. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube and you’ll find it fascinating. It will no doubt enhance your sense of the stage show but what a bizarre thing it is that David Harewood, arguably the top black actor in Britain, should be playing William F. Buckley. You can be all for colour-blind casting – Harewood was Antony to Vanessa Redgrave’s Cleopatra, Hotspur to Michael Gambon’s Falstaff – but William F. Buckley? A black Buckley risks turning diversity into an absurdity. None of which is to deny that the words (shorn of their original enunciations) will have a different slant and perhaps an illuminating one.

Much surer ground is Opera Australia’s revival from 13 June in Sydney of Verdi’s Rigoletto by one of our greatest directors, the late Elijah Moshinsky, with Ernesto Petti in the title role and with Renato Palumbo conducting. Shades of Fellini’s Italy, memories of fascist Italy.

Speaking of fascism spare a thought or a prayer for Helmut Berger who died the other day. He is riveting in The Damned, directed by his lover the great Visconti. The film is probably the greatest representation of the lead up to the second world war we have and Berger gives a staggering performance which includes a very camp top-hat impersonation of Marlene Dietrich. The blue angel herself, the voice of ‘Falling in Love Again’, sent him a photograph of herself with the question, ‘Who’s prettier?’