"Taxonomy of Aborted Ideas" is both a standalone work and a classification system inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' Chinese Encyclopedia and Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. Aborted ideas are part of the topography of unrealized projects, but unlike unrealized projects that might get realized at some point, aborted ideas are dead ends. As such, they tend to be ignored as irrelevant gestures or, at best, undermined by being "folded" as part of the larger, materialized body of work of an artist and denied any kind of autonomy. The system I propose addresses this by providing 77 unconventional categories devised to better understand aborted ideas. In "Taxonomy of Aborted Ideas," I use understated humor to render the tenuous contours of aborted ideas while underscoring the subjective side of classifying systems.

1. Ideas that saw themselves in the mirror of anachronism.
2. Anti-oedipal ideas filled with guilt and ambivalence.
3. Ideas castrated by mentor figures.
4. Ideas misunderstood by loved ones.
5. Ideas too entrenched in other fields of knowledge.
6. Ideas drowned in ambition.
7. Modest ideas so shy they did not want to bother anyone with their realization.
8. Dystopian ideas too comfortable with their impetus.
9. Ideas that were mostly a jumble of clichés.
10. Depressed ideas that had fallen in love with failure.
11. Ideas that fell prey to their own hedonism.
12. Slippery ideas that could never be outlined.
13. Ideas pierced with lines of flight.
14. Chaotic ideas that never found their way to chaos theory.
15. Ideas with an acute hope deficiency.
16. Emaciated ideas.
17. Ideas articulated in unintelligible languages.
18. Ideas so large they went from ambitious to utterly obscene.
19. Ideas so repressed they needed too many hours of psychoanalysis to be functional.
20. Sensory ideas overwhelmed by their perceptive capacity.
21. Sensitive ideas tormented by thoughts.
22. Ideas so political they could have run for office.
23. Ideas already corrupted by the potential of commercial success.
24. Self-identified green ideas that were neither renewable nor recyclable.
25. Amorphous ideas with a deep geometric complex.
26. Ideas already mortified with their own privilege.
27. Academic ideas suffering from solipsism.
28. Ideas so ephemeral they were gone with the wind.
29. Ideas whose brightness was blinding to the point of damaging the artist's eyesight.
30. Shady ideas so bad with directions they couldn't find their way out of Plato's cave.
31. Ideas so impulsive and blunt they had already fired the artist.
32. Official ideas, edges defined with red tape.
33. Anthropofagic ideas so ravenous they devoured the artist's colons and semicolons.
34. Ideas already ridiculed by friends and art critics.
35. Presymbolic ideas mocked by babies.
36. Ideas whose rhythm was too complex to bear.
37. Duchampian ideas that couldn't get past the urinal.
38. Ideas whose toughness tore the veils of nuance.
39. Ideas conflated with thoughts.
40. Ideas so defined by the unbearable pain of tenderness that would have been crushed in their first outing.
41. Ideas so opulent they were trapped in the Palace of Means to an End.
42. Ideas so small they wouldn't have been detected by the Large Hadron Collider.
43. Absentee ideas caught in their lack of presence.
44. Fixed ideas.
45. Ideas so totalitarian they demanded complete and absolute subservience of the artist.
46. General ideas that didn’t understand how to be specific.
47. Ideas rapidly heading in the direction of a black hole.
48. Chameleonic ideas.
49. Mirror ideas projecting ad infinitum.
50. Ideas lost in the labyrinth of their own subjectivity.
51. Ideas lost in their own reality shows.
52. Common sense ideas whose sense was too common.
53. Greedy ideas exploiting the Land of Knowledge without paying taxes.
54. Ideas chained by Pragmatism.
55. Ideas foreboding copyright infringement.
56. Ideas plagued with their own existential crisis.
57. Ideas wishing to secure their borders.
58. Ideas paralyzed by having to make an unequivocal decision on the forking path: immanence on the left, transcendence on the right.
59. Ideas suffering from acute Cognitive Dissonance.
60. Ideas with a generalized contempt for beauty.
61. Ideas caught conspiring to steal the aura from Art.
62. Canned ideas.
63. Ideas obsessed with their reproduction.
64. Ideas limited by their period.
65. Ideas consumed with their length.
66. Ideas consumed with their strength.
67. Exhumed ideas.
68. Self-sacrificing ideas.
69. Righteous ideas.
70. Leftous ideas.
71. Ideas made of sticky goo and string theory.
72. Ideas punctured by miniature black holes.
73. Broken record ideas that have lived in iterative thought at least a thousand times.
74. Immaterial ideas unable to cope with the materiality of the world.
75. Overcommitted ideas that could never stop working.
76. Ideas damp from their own tears.
77. Ideas that would not stop laughing at the world.