My friend Kate points to these photos of “street installations” by Mark Jenkins, bits of double-take inducing situationist art plopped down in various major cities, including D.C. What I dig about these is that they’re kind of like inversions of Duchamp’s Fountain which is the go-to example for every Aesthetics 101 discussion of that perennial puzzler: “What is Art?” Duchamp’s gag was to surround an ordinary “found object” with the institutional trappings of high-art, making a point about how those surroundings could transform an object and our reaction to it. (Or maybe just being a wiseass; who knows?) The beauty of these installations is precisely that they don’t announce themselves as art—they’d be much less interesting if they were up on a dais with a little plaque. They work in part because they’re injected where we don’t expect to find art—where we have to pause for a moment to wonder what, exactly we’re looking at. Is it art or just a moment of inexplicable weirdness? I’m almost sorry to have seen the pictures before having encountered one in person.