Editor's note: This story has been updated throughout after an interview with the young men who visited the museum.
Two Richardson teens out-arted visitors at the Dallas Museum of Art on Saturday.
The teens, who both go to J.J. Pearce High School in Richardson, artfully placed a pair of sunglasses and a watch near a corner in the DMA while docents weren't looking. Their logic went something like this: If that nearby pile of laundry is art, is this art, too?
They posted photos of their impromptu art installation to Twitter and the tweet went viral, nabbing more than 22,000 retweets and 32,000 favorites so far. Reddit readers had a ball with it, some saying it was an insensitive prank and others applauding their efforts to create pop-up performance art inside a space already housing abstract art.
Teens Jack Durham and Cole Wright told The Dallas Morning News it was all in good fun. And fun it was:
"A lot of people were like, 'There's no way this is real,'" Durham recalled as they stood back to watch museumgoers admire their unmarked art. "But some people were thinking, 'Wow, I wonder what this means?'"
An official at the Dallas Museum of Art called the act "cheeky":
"Marcel Duchamp pioneered the 'readymade' in 1914, placing a bottle rack, a snow shovel and then a urinal on display as free-standing works of art," says Maxwell Anderson, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, in a statement. "The presentation of the sunglasses at the DMA is a modest, cheeky guerrilla action in keeping with a venerable tradition."
Some art lovers went further, saying the teens are true artists.
"Even if this young man doesnt know what he did, he nailed it," wrote Reddit user Kame-hame-hug. "He challenged what art was by dissing the weird perception of museum art experinces [sic] and their institutional validation of art. Those people enjoyed his work, thought it over, and remember the item even once it is gone. He proved you both dont need a stamp of approval to make real art and that people will look at anything fondly if you put it in a format they find approved by experts and critics - at the same time."
Both teens are active in their high school's theater program and said "getting into character" came naturally.
Their teen-aged friends generally thought the idea was a funny one. "There have been debates on whether or not it's art and what constitutes art," Wright says. "At school, I don't think kids put that much thought into it."
Wright says his peers were more amazed by how popular it was online. He and Durham hoped for 80 retweets and got 400 times that number.
"I had to turn the [Twitter] notification off on my phone," Wright says.
