In the last quarter of the 18th century Denis Diderot railed against the duplicity of art dealers and collectors, the proliferation of amateurism, and the vulgarization of popular taste. Like other Enlightenment minds, Diderot was interested in improving the status and the cultural level of le peuple. The problem he struggled with was how to popularize art without sacrificing its inherent quality, a dilemma that would persist for another several hundred years. Diderot lived in the waning days of Rococo art and the dwindling days of the elitist aristocracy that had bred it. Emerging to replace both was an art and a social system purportedly for the people. Neoclassicism was all at once democratic, autocratic, pedagogical and lasciviously moral. Diderot faced up to the practical difficulty of his ideal and concluded, unhappily, that "taste is a matter of caprice"; the preferences of le peuple in art were at best unpredictable and at worst predictable of the least desirable attributes of art. Someone must act as guide and setter of exemplars for popular taste. As Diderot saw it, the function of the art critic was interpretive and instructive. Technical matters were best known to the artist, but ideas, the meaning of art, fell to the wisdom of the critic who, in turn, would educate the public. Diderot wrote for the French Salon exhibitions - among the first of the public showings of art in Western cultural history. Le peuple perhaps did require knowledgeable interpretations of art and thus was conceived the profession of the art critic, in terms hardly different from today's definition.