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Pranksters put glasses on museum floor, people think it's art

SAN FRANCISCO — A prank at the recently re-opened San Francisco Museum of Modern Art could easily become a social experiment.

The Huffington Post reported that 17-year-old TJ Khayatan and his friends took advantage of the newly remodeled SFMOMA by putting TJ's glasses on the floor, as if it was an art display.

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Soon after the glasses were put in an empty spot of the museum, people walked over and observed it as art.

Some even took photos of it on their digital cameras, which TJ documented on Twitter.

The SFMOMA was a good sport, tweeting that TJ may be a modern-day Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp famously bought a urinal, turned it on its side, and signed it "R. Mutt 1917," naming the piece "Fountain."

The move was one of Duchamp's works that challenged what is traditionally considered art.

TJ told BuzzFeed News he and his friends tried the same prank with other items, including a baseball cap, but the glasses prank was the most successful.

He said the motivation for the prank was that "some of the ‘art’ wasn’t very surprising" to some of his friends.

"I can agree that modern art can be a joke sometimes, but art is a way to express our own creativity," he said. "Some may interpret it as a joke, some might find great spiritual meaning in it. At the end of the day, I see it as a pleasure for open-minded people and imaginative minds."