Word: unrealized
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...Unreal Exhibition...
Having Scott Anderson as the creative genius behind the major compositions, paintings and literary works of the twentieth century provides a convenient and heavy-handed way of getting at these themes and questions, although the highly improbable scenario has a certain forced, unreal tone. Instead of making an insightful comment on how we define artistic greatness and bestow fame, it actually takes something away from the ambitious discussion of our desire for those things. The precarious arrangement behind which Scott has hidden his genius from the outside world is all about to come undone, two days before Scott?...
Forget about black monoliths. If the late great Stanley Kubrick had known what was going to be really cool by the year 2001, his seminal movie would have opened with 25 million ape-descendants clustered silently round an awe-inspiring and somewhat unreal auction house. Then to the tune of the Blue Danube, some bizarrely diverse items would shoot weightlessly through the ether - sterling silver Jaguar cars, Sherlock Holmes first editions, Xerox networked printers, a pair of Madonna concert tickets, an ostrich-egg incubator - moving at a rate of 5 million purchases per day. The climactic scene, perhaps, would feature...
...unreal auction house in question is, of course, eBay, which is in many ways the most powerful pure-play Internet force on planet Earth in 2001. It has recently become the top e-commerce destination, growing at a rate of roughly 1 million users per month. While its brethren in the legendary website club (namely Yahoo! and Amazon.com) suffer alarming slowdowns in growth, eBay posts quarter after quarter of stunning profits (its latest: $21 million, an increase of more than 150% on the same period last year...
...Future college classes might name the O. J. Simpson trial, the death of Princess Diana or of John Kennedy Jr., or perhaps Oklahoma City or Columbine, all events that were real enough but also unreal, or surreal, because experienced as a cloud of hyped-up, noisy electrons coalescing on a screen at home, interrupted by commercials. Maybe the class of 2015 will say that their most important public memory - their defining moment of civic awareness - was Bill Clinton wagging that long, bony finger and saying, "I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this one more...