WHATEVER THEY WILL CHOOSE TO BE CALLED

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

The future exhibition at Blurred Marble Gallery, which will cause the great majority of art-lovers to convulse with laughter, while also identifying a small knot of enthusiastic defenders, will offer the most complete account of the next hundred years of non-representational art. It will illustrate not only the achievement, such as it is, of the Post-Dogmatists, the Quasi-Conclusivists, and the Proto-Oblivionists, or whatever they will choose to be called, but the earlier surges in the art of the coming century which will lead to those appalling (or amazing, depending on your perspective) developments. A few artists must be noted by name, for without them the near future will not turn into the distant future quite so economically. There is William “Bull” Signac, of course, who will paint tiny portraits and then turn them to the wall. There is Elsa Surety, who will create sculptures from self-healing concrete and also create machines that attack those sculptures. There is H. L. Crest, who will exhibit empty boxes of electrical glass and call them Imprisoned Thoughts. Each of these artists will inspire both devotion and derision. None has yet been born.