April 4, 2022 Issue

I love lists of what the artist Philip Guston called “crapola.” Laura Preston’s Talk story, “Incidental Masterpieces,” in this week’s issue, contains a dandy:

Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading “Alone Ave.”; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops.

Preston's list is the verbal equivalent of a Cornell box or a Rauschenberg combine: junk transformed into art. Alchemy!