It was about an artist named Geoff Lupo who goes around New York City hanging up hand-drawn fliers that offer to sell mundane items like a cracker or a thumbtack for 15 cents.
The film showed people actually calling him and buying the stuff. It even showed and art collector who had started to collect Lupo's work and resell it on the streets, becoming a kind of itinerant museum curator.
Most of us weren't sure what to think about Lupo's work, because it seemed that people weren't so interested in collecting his fliers as they were actually going through the process of buying the items. This weirded us out because we are used to thinking of art as something drawn or painted that we hang up in an art gallery or in our home.
Though Lupo's drawings were good, it wasn't the drawings themselves that seemed to attract people. Rather it was the mystery and the novelty of the situation he had set up with the fliers. Lupo had created an interesting story that people wanted to enter, even though they knew it was absurd.
We decided that Lupo's art wasn't so much drawing as it was dramaturgy (the theory and practice of drama). In a way, Lupo was a performance artist who invited people through his fliers to be in a small, unscripted play with him.
So it was the idea behind the artwork that intrigued people.
Most of us decided that Lupo's artwork could be described as good art if we judged it on its ability to get people to participate in his little plays. Others of us held that Lupo was simply a nut.
