UCLA’s Hammer Museum might be known for exhibiting modern examples of progressive artworks, but Will Ferrell and Joel McHale just don’t quite get it.

Featuring in a short film created for the museum’s new “Stories of Almost Everyone” exhibition, the two comics get a VIP tour from Hammer curator Aram Moshayedi.

The pair are openly “bewildered, sometimes verging on disparaging, by the everyday objects that make up the show”, reports AdWeek:

Museums are often pretty humorless [sic] when it comes to their artwork. It’s rare for them to acknowledge that art can be confusing—particularly conceptual art, where the artist’s choices can seem self-indulgent or bafflingly arbitrary.

But the Hammer Museum at UCLA leans into that confusion in an amusing new short film made by some A-list talent in front of, and behind, the camera.

A pair of socks thrown on the ground? A handful of giant telephone poles lying across the gallery room? The museum’s actual mail, unopened and thrown in a corner? Ferrell and McHale try to make sense of these oddities, and more, in what turns out to be an engagingly counterintuitive way to get more people to visit and see the show.

This one is a good time:

So what is “Stories of Almost Everyone”, which opened January 28, all about? Well, according to the museum, it’s “an exhibition about the willingness to believe the stories that are conveyed by works of contemporary art”:

This exhibition is organized around the premise that objects of contemporary art possess narrative histories and inner lives that the conventions of display can only, at best, approximate. Through the work of over thirty international artists, Stories of Almost Everyone seeks to address the means by which a broad range of contemporary artworks and artifacts traffic in meaning and mythology in equal measure.

The challenge that textual mediation poses to the inherent muteness of objects provides a framework for thinking through the potential for ideas facilitated by art to expand into other realms of thought. The varying artistic approaches brought together for this exhibition are as equally emboldened by a faith in objects to communicate their inherent value, as they are skeptical of the conditions of museological mediation and art’s promise to convey meaning.

Did you get any of that? I guess now we’re all Ferrell and McHale.

[source:adweek]