"The appointed billboard was above a Sunglass Hut, just a few paces from an Armed Forces recruiting station. Times Square was doing its Times Square thing..."

"... total sensory overload. Capitalism on cocaine. It was 8:15 p.m. I waited. Was this actually going to happen or was it some kind of conceptual art prank? And who even is Yoko Ono?

Writes Sebastian Smee in "No matter what the haters say, Yoko Ono was always about peace. Now her message is on a Times Square billboard" (WaPo). The billboard is pink and just says "Imagine Peace."

Answering his question "who even is Yoko Ono?," Smee continues:

Ono had a gift for “event scores” that were by turns mundane, poetic and (poetically) impossible.... [for example] “Disappearing Piece,” which simply commands: “Boil water” (the piece ends when the water completely evaporates) and “Clock Piece,” which instructs: “Make all the clocks in the world fast by/ two seconds without letting anyone know/ about it.”

You can easily imagine one that says: “Sit next to John Lennon throughout the recording sessions for a Beatles album. Do nothing — except when you scream.” Or one that says, simply: “Imagine Peace.”...

Smee discusses Ono's "Cut Piece," from 1964, which I embedded on this blog 11 days ago, here. Ono sits silently and quietly while members of the audience do what she's instructed: Pick up scissors and cut pieces of her clothing away. My embedding had to do with some current fashion that looked as if someone had taken scissors to a woman's ordinary clothes and left them disturbingly lopped off. Smee connects it to her long history of peace activism:

Some of the questions it prompts — When will this stop? Who will intervene to stop it? — were being asked as Vietnam turned into a quagmire, and they are being asked again now about Ukraine. But as the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has argued, there is “another, historically specific register of meaning” for “Cut Piece.” The performance, she points out, is about reciprocity. Ono was making an offering, providing a souvenir, encouraging a kind of commemoration. Of what? Of the unspeakably high cost of war. After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. Army prohibited images that showed the effects of the blasts. Ten years later, when photographs, drawings and written accounts were finally permitted, one of the most common descriptions was how the blasts had shredded people’s clothes....

Getting back to the present-day billboard, Smee concludes:

Instead of judging Ono’s gesture by its “effectiveness” (what is a billboard ever going to achieve?), we might think of it instead as her latest “event score,” an instruction we can try to carry out — or not.