The Way We Do Art Now and Other Sacred Tales(1973)

A series of 19 short parables concerning modes of representation, language and cognition. Often conveyed through conscious misinformation, Baldessari's witty puns and jokes play off the relation of word, image and meaning; the intersection of what is heard or written, what is seen, and what is understood. For example, he shows us an image of a duffel bag and proceeds to describe, in detail, an object bearing no resemblance to a duffel bag, which is eventually revealed to be a stool. In A Sentence with Hidden Meaning, he writes the phrase, "A sentence with hidden meaning" on a legal pad, hiding the word "hidden" so that it reads, "A sentence with meaning."