The curators have cast a wide net in local, international and underground communities to find artists, including street artists, known for rephrasing objects in distortional ways. The rows of logo T-shirts on boxes lined up against the wall, by the London-based artists Richard Sides and Gili Tal, are just like the T-shirts you’ll find outside, rewritten with an anarchic twist: “Vote Acid,” reads one. Those shopping bags on the floor, sent by the German artist Maria Eichhorn, are filled with empty tea boxes, plastic water bottles, and chewing gum wrappers discarded by people installing the show, a kind of behind-the-scenes gallery diary.

Many of the 65 exhibits are art-referential pieces, art about art, and you start consulting the exhibition menu for clues to understanding them. But after a while, you get into the rhythm of trusting your eye and instincts. You notice that in “Maso Chair,” the subversive Swiss architects Trix and Robert Haussmann replaced the gaskets on the metal frame of an Eames chair with flower studs used to support floral arrangements — ouch! And isn’t that contorted steel tube that the New York artist Wade Guyton twisted up into the air the remnant of the iconic 1920s Breuer chair?

These ready-mades are not beautiful, signature originals with a strong physical presence, but artworks that critique formal art. You have to get rid of that nasty notion that “I could have done this,” or, rather, you gradually understand that you actually could do this, at home, tonight. Your perception shifts. Pleasantly and unexpectedly brainwashed, you walk back out to St. Marks Place and gaze at the T-shirts and hats and hookah pipes and think about signing them. Somehow you hear the rumble of motorcycles with a new interest and curiosity: it’s a John Cage cantata.

Even the lively St. Marks Place feels more alive. Life is art and art, life. Dada rules.