Yet McQueen is living proof of an artist who became successful despite a conspicuous lack of opportunities.
And America provides them with excellent opportunities for conspicuous consumption; Shaun is dead happy that he's just blown a grand on some Armani gear, Bez has been showing off an expensive new Tag watch he bought in Chicago.
There is more to the restaurant than the opportunity for conspicuous consumption.
Never before has the world afforded such an opportunity for gigantic and conspicuous monuments.
At the same time, Harris shows, urban black women strove for economic and social prospects and pleasures, and in the process experienced the conspicuous and hidden dangers associated with newfound labor opportunities".
Its most conspicuous expression was perhaps Bush's "Mission Accomplished" photo opportunity after the invasion of Iraq.
Mr Major, who preaches the equal opportunities for which his own life is a conspicuous advertisement, has far to go if ever he is to impose that vision on a deeply conservative country.
The show attracted two hundred and fifteen thousand visitors, more than twice as many as the museum had projected, and was praised by critics as a revelatory opportunity to experience sixteenth-century consumption at its most conspicuous.
Its support of equal rights and opportunities for blacks, progressive in the context of southern politics, was as conspicuous in the 1960s and 1970s as it had been 100 years before during the Reconstruction era.
The danger is that the appearance that every proposal is weighed for its conspicuous contrition will undermine good ideas and make the chance of real reform look as distant as that other great missed opportunity, change in the City.
