Word: reductios
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...factors. First, the shortening supply of American collections that actually contain the kind of things a great museum would want to have. (The 1980s produced shoals of zillionaires but few connoisseurs.) And second, a fashion among the rich for making their own "vanity" museums, a practice whose reductio ad absurdum was reached by places like the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago and the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles -- a $100 million shell with maybe six paintings of quality inside...
...This reductio ad absurdum of TV's talk-show mania has had funny sequences, like Jim Belushi joining in an inept neighborhood game of charades: while the women whiz through titles like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the men are stumped by Jaws. But the Hollywood-meets-the-heartland satire falls a little flat. My Talk Show is too straitlaced and good-natured; it needs a bit of the rudeness of Late Night with David Letterman. Or at least some quirkier performers. Where have you gone, Louise Lasser...
That is the way great ideas end, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but through reductio ad absurdum. You know investment bankers are not satisfied until every good idea is driven into the ground like a tomato stake...