With this fifty-eighth article from our ongoing series, we hope to provide our distinguished readership with a blow-by-blow account of the growing intrigue in Fanali.

— Gitanjali Dang reporting live from Fanali

February 26, 2080: Struldbruggian and valetudinarian have swiftly become the two adjectives most readily associated with contemporary visual art as it were. Although the mandarin-keepers of this rarefied atmosphere have adopted several well-intentioned, albeit spurious, strategies to carry out the much-needed resuscitation, thus far no approach has hit the ground running.

One move in particular, set off an intriguing chain of events, which may or may not culminate in the much-desired resurrection.

The Board of Willynilly Palimpsect has been extolled for its far-reaching influence. In its fiftieth year, the Board has been successfully rewriting and/or erasing errant histories.

One of its more compelling recent tasks involved tracking down and retiring a pidgin – which for security reasons must not be named – native to the Ship of Fools. For those of you who can rarely, if ever, afford access to news, Fanali, a site somewhere off the coast of Iceland, was reclaimed over a decade ago. However in 2077, with the inexplicable reappearance of the Ship
of Fools news of the island’s existence also came to light. Following its unprecedented return the ship was allowed to dock in the port of Fanali. It is understood that soon after the Fools began inundating the island people with their forbidden tongue. When Willynilly Palimpsect waltzed into the picture, it did what it does best, and ensured that the perilous pidgin was smurfed to incognoscible smithereens.

Soon after this thumping triumph, certain upper rung members of the art domain approached The Board to retire Gallery, the term, as also its various permutations and connotations. Some (concentric) circles have held the belief that
 the gallery by any other name will smell different. Right-wingers have also heated up the fray, but for reasons entirely different. While some factions find the uncertain provenance 
of the noun troublesome and highly delinquent, the others find the noun’s allegiance to galilea or church porch most troubling.

Despite being weighed down by several pressing tasks, the Board could no longer ignore the clout of the lobbies insisting on the retirement of gallery. They reluctantly put on hold the rehabilitation of a certain Monsieur Foucault – the discovery of the Ship of Fools damaged F’s already tottering repute, this article is perhaps the last you will ever hear of him – and focused on the gallery conundrum. Instead of retiring the word in its entirety, the Board came up with two ingenious shibboleths: the space formerly known as the gallery and gal.

Of course, within weeks it became evident that, try
as they might neither the space formerly known as the gallery nor the gal was going to alter the course of nose-diving visual art. Meh! Meh! Meh! In order to stymie the possibility of any retrogressions in the future, another plan was located and another committee was inaugurated. Takinguptheslack Consortium, is an august gathering of game designers, linguists, topologists, physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, filmmakers, chemists, biologists, geneticists, paleontologists, anthropologists, seismologist, computer engineers, virologist, animators, professors, academics, authors, volcanologist and so forth. Needless to say, this Consortium is led by a phalanx of esteemed bureaucrats, with each bureaucrat-minder adopting an intellectual to keep a firm leash on her/his thoughts and to look out for signs of too much, too soon.

Currently the members
 of the Consortium are in Fanali, flogging a dead horse, more affectionately known as contemporary visual art. Each day, one pair suggests possible methods of galvanisation. There are 10,000 such pairs. Today pair number fifty-eight <topologist + bureaucrat> is presenting an intervention. The buzz has it that this one could be a clincher.

But let us briefly step away from the activities on Fanali. It would be significant to note, that artists, curators, gallerists, museum directors and their ilk have been disincluded from the Consortium. To their great dismay just as Takinguptheslack was being formulated, the international Court of Crimes against humanities summoned the Struldbrugs. A PIL filed by an as-yet-unknown body – although all fingers currently point at the miscreants belonging to the Panegyrists Inc – has accused the Struldbrugs of assassinating Late Style in broad daylight with a single gunshot wound to the chest.

The last known definition of late Late Style is thus: The epiphanic moment when a torus aka doughnut finally recognises that it is homeomorphic. And that it can transform into a coffee mug like receptacle for new ideas.

Should the verdict be in favour of Panegyrists Inc, then 
the Struldbrugs will be faced
 with an as-yet-unknown but nonetheless grave sentence. The frail topologist acknowledged the standing ovation of those congressed and took a seat at the edge of her seat. As had been the custom over the last fifty-seven encounters, the topologist’s ideas got filtered through the conjoined bureaucrat’s rima oris.

The topologist has always been known for her long-drawn manner, and the bureaucrat rightly shrank her 35 page long presentation to a succinct 52 words.

This is how it went:

I propose… er… We propose that we re-pu-deee-it the white cube and in its… in its… place institute the Hilbert; cube that is. A topological space, Hilbert will expand and shrink to accommodate art. Several topological spaces, also known as subspaces, within the Hilbert will allow us to, literally, make room for various seen-crow-nous initiatives.

There was a great deal of scepticism among the adopted lot. But the bureaucrats saw this as a tremendous opportunity to offload fraught payloads at sites that are off the mainland. In the hours following the presentation, the topologist’s peers were left with little option and thought it best to agree with the world wise ways of their minders. To cover the tracks of their original scepticism, they finally proclaimed that the reclaimed-off-the-mainland sites were full of ‘potentialities’. The new refrain asserted that the reclamation could also be read as a perfect conceptual device for the rejuvenation of the arts.