A Word Birth : Stuublicity

stuublicity, n, ( stü-`blis-ə-tē ) "stoo-BLISS-uh-tee" (origin: combining the first three letters of stupid with all but the first letter of publicity).

1) In the Art World, the “stupid publicity” elements of an artist’s life story (television appearances, outlandish quotes in magazines, credentials, celebrity status, etc) which are not directly connected to the artistic output, but which do enhance the output’s importance or marketplace value ---at least on a de facto basis at some galleries. (That gallery values stuublicity more than the visual content of the artwork; they’ll hang bad art if the artist is famous and ignore good art by artists who have no press following.)

2) In the Art World, any action which could be judged stupid which was motivated by a real or imagined need for publicity. (In an act of stuublicity, the artist changed her name to Worldpeace Yeahright Crap in order to be more memorable and perhaps newsworthy.)

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This is the birth of a word.

At the time of creation, it had NO appearances on Google anywhere. Included below is a screencap image of no search results (colors inverted to prevent reader confusion with an actual active browser window). Anyone able to do image forensics should be able to see that it is unaltered except for the color-flip.

Why this spelling?

An easier to use combination of stupid and publicity, stupidicity, is already taken (647 Google search results when I tried it) and it was widely used just to mean gross stupidity ---no connection to publicity. It was a Bushism-style [ wiki ] pre-mangled word connoting “so stupid that the subject can’t even say word stupid right.” So stupidicity: no good.

Another loser was stublicity with one u ("stub-LISS-uh-tee"). It appeared eight times ---always used as half of a publicity stunt spoonerism: stublicity punt. Clever. Taken ---and not the word I was seeking since the established meaning wasn’t quite right.

The next available pronounceable word for STUpid pUBLICITY was stuublicity.

I hereby establish this word, stuublicity, as an act of conceptual art. You conceptual artists out there will understand.



















It might be that stuublicity would leak out of the art world and into general usage. Well, sure, why not? I can imagine, for example, "'Idiot Action Dad' (Mr Falcon Heene), in a misguided quest for stuublicity, attempted the Balloon Boy Hoax [ wiki ] as a stublicity punt."






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