Word: oblivions
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...almost any kind "coincides" with the inflation of minor talents into major ones, of mere promise into claims on art history. It is that the one has produced the other. In the process, too many painters have been left without a middle ground between the miseries of oblivion and the stresses of cultural stardom. Hence fame depends, to a grotesque and absurd extent, on painters' ability to excite envy among their rivals, and the sense of common reciprocity that pervaded the art world up to ten years ago is drying out. Where it still exists, it is more...
...especially popular with Los Angeles collectors, his untutored and zappy scrawls routinely praised for their "energy." (This anxious hope for signs of energy is a sure index of cultural flabbiness.) But for postgraffiti art the writing is already on the wall, and such careers, rolling in their limos to oblivion, remind one of Robert Graves' Epitaph on an Unfortunate Artist...
...believe," Jean Dubuffet declared in 1958, "in the utility of oblivion. In fact I should like to see a mammoth statue of Oblivion in the main square of every town, instead of the libraries and museums. Let us make a clean sweep of the art of the past!" Fat chance. Such manifestos had already been part of the rubric of modernism -- or of a certain kind of modernism -- for the best part of half a century, since the Futurist Filippo Marinetti and the Dadaist Hugo Ball exhorted the young to burn their museums for the sake...
There are certain words that English ought to have but does not. One is a word for the opposite of memory. Oblivion is not quite it. Forgettery? That swampy region in the southland of the brain where everything we have forgotten now lies, overgrown with kudzu, something like an enormous automobile graveyard...
...Harvard's defense grew shaky and its offense slid into oblivion, just as Stroudsburg came alive...