Word: monumentalize
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...Washington monument has vanished. In place of its tapering obelisk, a pair of colossal scissors, several hundred feet high, slowly opens during the day and shuts during the night. In Chicago, a clothespin stands where the Tribune Tower once was. In London, Nelson's Column has been replaced by a giant gearshift, which twitches and gyrates erratically through its patterns, scaring the pigeons away from Trafalgar Square forevermore. Have we all been colonized by the Brobdingnagians? Not quite. Claes Oldenburg is at work, and an exhibition of his imaginary monsters, entitled Object into Monument, is now touring...
...dealing with Oldenburg's unbuildable projects is to see them as monstrous parodies of this situation. In 1965, he dreamed up a monument for upper Central Park in the form of a giant teddy bear: this woebegone and helpless image was, for Oldenburg, "an incarnation of white conscience; as such, it fixes white New York with an accusing glance from Harlem but also one glassy-eyed from desperation. This may be why I chose a toy with the 'amputated' effect of teddy paws-handlessness signifies society's frustrating lack of tools...
That feeling was running strong in the Republic all week long. A bomb damaged Dublin's monument to the Duke of Wellington. Airport workers refused to service British airplanes, forcing flight cancellations. Toward the end of the week a mob of more than 1,000 badly damaged the British Rail ways office in Cork with fire bombs...
...looked around and saw the United States transformed into a hideous monument to these men and their beliefs: cities everywhere run like kingdoms, filled with high-rises for the A students and rubble for the rest; an electoral system designed to preclude any real choice by those voting; a monstrous war begun by executive order and designed by the former Dean of the Harvard Faculty and his bright young cronies. Our rebellion was, in part, an attempt to destroy the identities which Harvard had prepared for us as administrators of the A students' empire, to reach out and proclaim...
...current champion of Roman monument perchers is Dante Ottaviani, 27, who last week set a city record by perching for seven days and seven nights on the rim of the Colosseum, 150 ft. above the cobblestones. A one-time petty criminal turned street peddler, Ottaviani was protesting the fact that the cops had confiscated his stock of transistor radios and cigarette lighters on the grounds that he did not have a proper license to sell them...