among friends

In John’s conceptual art class, we discussed the British artist Michael Craig-Martin. In his piece “An Oak Tree” (at the Tate), he set a half-full glass of water on a glass shelf and called it an oak tree. To him, it was an oak tree—until he couldn’t get through customs at the airport, so he broke down and told them it was actually a shelf and a glass.

When I was home for spring break, I saw that on my dad’s filing cabinet, he had a set of magnets from an opening of the Craig-Martin show “Alphabets and Sunsets.” Each magnet was a different letter of the alphabet, with a picture on it in the style of “A is for apple, B is for boy.” However, I soon realized that the pictures didn’t go with the letters: A had an umbrella, B a wine glass, and C a knife.

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