Near the end of the current exhibition—at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art—of 50 years of Cy Twombly's works on paper is a trio of 1996 engravings in monotype ink (not available for reproduction), all three titled "Lepanto," and each one a childlike rendition of a Renaissance warship. The reference is to the momentous 1571 naval battle fought between Christians and Turks for control of the Mediterranean, a conflict that puts you in mind of present-day events. But a more intriguing allusion might be to Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, who suffered a crippled left arm while fighting at Lepanto. Twombly's scribbles are as functionless as Cervantes' withered limb—and that's the point. In a world that puts the highest value on easy meaning and quantifiable results, this artist creates meaningless scrawls. They are truly a "quixotic gesture"—"utterly impractical" and "imaginary," as my dictionary defines the meaning of "quixotic." Twombly's art is the ghost of Cervantes' useless arm.