My Wounded Inner Borgesian says this is one of the greatest piece of conceptual art ever made — 350 years ago?! Which might imply that what we now know as Conceptual Art maybe wasn’t really so great after all, a point made very sharply by Lewis Mumford (in the Pentagon of Power, IIRC — a spread involving an Ad Reinhardt painting).
EDIT (added 2024-11-24): here’s that Mumford image. Someone could write an entire essay just on Mumford’s captions, which ranged from abrupt insults to micro-essays exploding with ideas — like this one:
20: Homage to Giantism
Tinguely’s sculptural happening, ‘Homage to New York,’ presents the subjective urban disintegration that Waldo Frank penetrated in ‘The American Jungle’ a generation ago. This formalized expression of megatechnic chaos is the negative counterpart of the outward drill and discipline of the daily round. The Port of New York Authority’s World Trade Center, 110 stories high, is a characteristic example of the purposeless giantism and technological exhibitionism that are now eviscerating the living tissue of every great city. The Port Authority, a quasi-governmental corporation, was in origin a happy political invention, first installed in London; but unfortunately its social functions have been subordinated to pecuniary motivations: and its executives have conceived it their duty to funnel more motor traffic into the city, through new bridges and tunnels, than its streets and its parking spaces can handle — while contributing to the lapse of a more adequate system of public transportation that included railroad, subway. and ferry. This policy has resulted in mounting traffic congestion, economic waste, and human deterioration though with a constant rise in land values and speculative profits. These baneful results were anticipated and graphically depicted by Clarence S. Stein, then Chairman of the New York State Housing and Regional Planning Commission, in his article on ‘Dinosaur Cities’ in the Survey Graphic. May 1925. Stein there described the breakdowns — already quite visible — resulting from housing congestion, water shortage, sewage pollution, street clogging, traffic jams, and municipal bankruptcy. But Dinosaurs were handicapped by insufficient brains, and the World Trade Center is only another Dinosaur.
See also: 2011 > Cablegate — The Complete Wikipedia Datadump, Vol. 1 — on the intersection of art, cryptography, and jokes