Or "There's One Born Every Minute."

If the Onion wrote about the state of modern art, it wouldn't come close to the reality.

...And 20 grand seemed reasonable compared with another Friedman piece being sold at the same auction. This one, also untitled, is a two-foot white cube with a barely visible black speck set right in the middle of the top surface. Would you like to guess what that black speck is? You're advised to think outside the box.

To again quote Christie's, it is ".5mm of the artist's feces."

Yes, Tom Friedman put his poop on a pedestal, and last week Christie's tried to sell it, with bidding to start at $45,000.

The ability to pump out verbal nonsense like an F-1 turbopump is a major requirement for any modern artist:

"I wanted to find a material that you could present the smallest amount of and it would have the most impact," Friedman says of the piece. "I was really interested in minimalism then and with minimalism there's this sense of purity, of clean forms and geometry. I really liked the juxtaposition. The cube is logical and clean. The feces is regressive and insane."

Gallery owners quickly learn to speak the non-language:

"It seemed to me that he had an open-ended area of investigation and a finesse with materials, or a dialogue with materials and how to get them to work and to resonate," says Hudson.

Other masterpieces by the same artist:

He tends to use stuff that you'd find around the house (glue, paper, Play-Doh), so that hey-I-could-do-that response is no accident. That squiggle aside, most of his work is obsessively composed. He once carved a self-portrait on an aspirin. (And it looks like him!) He made a perfect sphere out 1,500 pieces of bubble gum he chewed, which he then wedged into the corner of a wall. Another time he placed his pubic hairs on a bar of soap, arranging them in perfect circles, like the rings on a radar screen.