An amazing Matchbox-centric work, “Metropolis II,” by artist Chris Burden. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)

From Peter Schjeldahl’s 2007 New Yorker piece about Burden: “An efficient test of where you stand on contemporary art is whether you are persuaded, or persuadable, that Chris Burden is a good artist. I think he’s pretty great. Burden is the guy who, on November 19, 1971, in Santa Ana, California, produced a classic, or an atrocity (both, to my mind), of conceptual art by getting shot. ‘Shoot’ survives in desultory black-and-white photographs with this description: ‘At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.’ Why do such things? “I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist,’ Burden explained, when I visited him recently at his studio in a brushy glen of Topanga Canyon, where he lives with his wife, the sculptor Nancy Rubins. ‘The models were Picasso and Duchamp. I was most interested in Duchamp.””

“Shoot,” 1971: