Word: useless
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Wrote Critic Mario Monteverdi in utter exasperation* at the Fautrier prize: "It is fitting that Fautrier should have won . . . for his are the ugliest, most vulgar, and useless non-paintings in the entire show. Giving him a prize clears the way for a legitimate revolt which, if clamorous enough, might save the Biennale...
...cases after British Urologist Thomas Moore diagnosed a man's illness as obstruction caused by overgrowth of the prostate gland, the patient's wife exclaimed: "I'm sure I have the same trouble-I have just the same symptoms." To laymen, who think that the relatively useless prostate is the male's exclusive property, this sounds silly. Even doctors, who know from their anatomy books that glands around a woman's urethra are analogous to the male organ, usually dismiss the diagnosis as implausible...
Nothing was safe from it, for art and craftsmanship had been declared equal. Architects designed chinaware and brooches; some painters even gave up their canvases ("Down with these useless objects") to potter around with posters and fancy screens. When Toulouse-Lautrec dined at the home of the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, he found that the food had been chosen for its color. It was characteristic of the age that Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray had one favorite novel bound in nine different ways to suit his changing moods...
...army that gobbles up 50% of the budget. Commerce had slowed to a near standstill; in central Java only 50 sugar mills were operating (v. 120 prewar), and some 200,000 mill workers were unemployed. Everywhere, there was graft, red tape and spectacular inefficiency. Shiny new Czech tractors proved useless in the flooded rice fields; some 30% of a 100,000-ton Swedish shipment of cement had turned to rock because no one thought to bring it in out of the rain...
...roadside signs are apt to be costly and useless. Many Africans have found that they make good roofing material...