The Museum Placard
Estimated Completion Time:
10
minutes
INSTRUCTIONS
Look around. Find the most mundane object within reach. A charging cable, a coaster, a pen with a dentist's name on it, a takeout container you have not thrown away.
Write the placard that would sit next to it in a museum. Play it completely straight. Include:
A title, with a year
The materials
What the artist was exploring
One sentence about its cultural significance
Example:
UNTITLED (BREAK ROOM), 2019. Polypropylene, adhesive residue, dried marinara. The artist interrogates the boundary between ownership and community, posing a question the office has spent four years refusing to answer.
The trick is not being funny. The trick is being sincere about something ridiculous. Sincerity is what makes it funny, and it is also what makes you look at a takeout container for longer than you ever have.
WHAT THIS HELPS
Attention. Most things are more interesting than you have given them credit for, because you stopped looking after the first half second.
Got it. Thanks for actually doing the exercise.