In another container there was a work of art consisting of a video, repeated over and over, showing a man — not in peak physical condition, I might add — rollerblading around a vast empty space, stark naked. I’m proud to say I betrayed no emotion while viewing this work, although my daughter, who is 3, said, quite loudly: “You can see his tushy! Yuck!”

She is young, and has no art training.

Anyway, in the corner of one container there was a ratty old collapsed armchair — worn, dirty, leaking stuffing, possibly housing active vermin colonies. I asked the gallery person if the chair was art, and she said yes, it was a work titled “Chair.” I asked her what role the artist had played in creating “Chair.” She said: “He found it.”

“Chair” is for sale. The price is $2,800. Really. I looked up “Chair” on a Serious Art Internet site, artcritical.com, which said: “The chair offers not a weedy patina of desuetude but an apotheosis of its former occupant.”

See, I missed that altogether, about the desuetude and the apotheosis. I thought it was just a crappy old junk chair some guy took off a trash pile and was now trying to sell for 2,800 clams.

From one of his Miami Herald columns entitled `The Idiot’s Guide to Art’.