The Sleeve should be Illegal and other reflections on art at the Frick, Edited by Michaelyn Mitchell £27, 168pp, Art Publishers ________ The curious title of this book The Sleeve Should Be Illegal comes from a short essay by the American novelist Jonathan Lethem on Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Sir Thomas More in the Frick Collection, New York. Lethem remembers growing up in Brooklyn, being in his last year at High School and killing time in Central Park. He used to sit with a friend on a boulder and smoke joints. High on art, youth and dope, they visited the Frick. Hans Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell “was a pinched nerd. We dug his hand, though. We stared a lot at that hand.” Holbein’s Thomas More was different: “More was our favourite, More was sublime. I was into science fiction and knew he’d written Utopia. Whatever it was. And More had that outlandish beard stubble, the weird “S-S-S” necklace, and, above all, the velvet sleeve. The sleeve was ecstasy, the sleeve should be illegal, the sleeve was Utopia.” I see what he means. It’s a helluva sleeve.