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Wednesday, December 5, 2007 12:00 AM

I'm an existential artist. People just don't get me!

How can I go on living in a world where people are so unoriginal?

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  • Wednesday, December 5, 2007 08:21 PM

    The Universal Artist

    The Existential Artist is inferior to the Universal Artist, at least, according to the Universal Artist. Unfortunately, there is a hierarchy of Artists of increasing aesthetic complexity, somewhat like the Borel hierarchy or the arithmetical and hyperarithmetical hierarchies of recursion theory.

    Typographical limitations preclude the inclusion of the diagram, so I will describe two infinite increasing chains that occur within it.

    One of them begins with Artists; then Existential Artists; then Universal Existential Artists; then Existental Universal Existential Artists; and so on.

    The other one also begins with Artists, but the alternation of quantifiers is reversed: there are Artists; Universal Artists; Existential Universal Artists; Universal Existential Universal Artists; and so on.

    The letter writer inhabits one of the lowest levels of this hierarchy, just above Artist.

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