The modern art world suffered another of its periodic embarrassments recently when a visiting high school student at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art set his glasses down on the floor against a bare wall and walked away, whereupon museum patrons took it to be the latest avant garde masterpiece, crowding around it while striking chin-pulling poses and snapping photos.
Although the prank was quickly exposed, art fans defaulted to the usual confusions about the quintessentially modern question — what is art? — with not a few concluding that in context it wasn’t a prank at all, but a legitimate new artistic expression. Never mind that the same teenager had previously punked art-goers with a baseball cap and a trash can placed in exhibit spaces.
