Prankster puts glasses on museum floor — visitors mistake them for art

People actually thought it was a great piece of postmodern art!

Source: Twitter

How many times have millions of dollars’ worth of art been mistaken as garbage and thrown out? Many times. In fact, Italy, in particular, has seen it happening multiple times — most recently as October 2015. Such incidents raise the question… How much does the lay person really understand art and installation work?

It also raises the question — what if the situation were reversed? How would people react if a random piece of object were kept in a museum? Seventeen-year-old prankster TJ Khayatan decided to find out.

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week, scores of people stood gazing and speculating about a pair of glasses placed on the floor, which they thought was a great piece of postmodern art. Many even maintained a safe distance from the pair of spectacles, trying to ‘interpret the artwork’.

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What all those people did not know was that the pair was placed on the floor by Khayatan as a lark, who took to Twitter to share the incident. The tweet — which has gone viral with over 46,000 retweets — has pictures of picture trying to figure out what the ‘artwork’ is all about.

LMAO WE PUT GLASSES ON THE FLOOR AT AN ART GALLERY AND… pic.twitter.com/7TYoHPtjP8

— teejay (@TJCruda) May 24, 2016

“Upon first arrival we were quite impressed with the artwork and paintings presented in the huge facility. However, some of the ‘art’ wasn’t very surprising to some of us. We stumbled upon a stuffed animal on a gray blanket and questioned if this was really impressive to some of the nearby people,” Khayatan told BuzzFeed.

Therefore, to test if people will really stare and appreciate this form of ‘art’, Khayatan put the glasses there and left only to see people gathering around it and taking pictures.

As a fun prank turned into a social experiment, it does make one wonder — Should we rejoice in finding art everywhere, or should we deplore that we can’t understand the difference between art and a prank?

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