In Newsweek, Blake Gopnik writes that:
Ever since Duchamp’s urinal hit the scene in 1917, and possibly for a dozen or more decades before that, what has set artwork off from other things in the world is not what it looks like or what it references or anything it does, but the fact that we’ve been invited to contemplate it as art.
The video above, by an artist who goes by Ken Tanaka (or David Ury) turns the garbage can, empty space and cardboard boxes of a dismantled exhibit into a piece of art that has people worked up, just by acting awe-struck by its supposed intended message (when of course it has none). In many ways, this spoof captures precisely the issue Gopnik seeks to highlight in his spectacular essay.
