"I 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 of the...
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