Just down the street from us is Madison Square Park. It’s a lovely little park that is surrounded by heritage buildings (Flatiron, Met Life, New York Life) and is home to the Shake Shack. It’s also notable as one of the few sites in the city that promote public art. In 2007, they featured sculptures by Roxy Paine. I quite liked this one (Conjoined):
Right now they’re featuring the work “Untitled (Tree House)” by Tadashi Kawamata. Here’s a shot:
Since I’ve recently been writing about apophenia (our tendency to see patterns everywhere), I thought I’d explore our tendency to see conspiracy theories everywhere. This art consists of tree house by an artist who likes to wrap things in pieces of wood (check out the link above). But why tree houses? And what if they weren’t really tree houses, but meant to be duck blinds? After all, this is a park and it’s got pigeons and they’re the rats of the sky and nobody likes them…
So now we’ve got a park full of duck blinds. But who’s going to go hunting? Well, the timing of this installation just happens to overlap the inauguration of Barack Obama – and the end of the Dick Cheney era. And everyone knows that Dick Cheney is a great hunter, so maybe the park is celebrating that Cheney’s out of office by creating this installation. So now the trust running this park hates all Republicans and is a tool of the Democratic party.
Now of course all of this is crap. It’s just a piece of work by an artist in the park. But I’d like to think that this is how conspiracy theories begin…