Friends with a fine sense of the absurd recently presented me with a newspaper clipping that I treasure and have since stashed in my bulging files under “U,” for Unbelievable.

The clipping features a photograph which I had overlooked when it ran in this newspaper a couple of weeks ago. It shows a group of people at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, viewing a painting which a Russian tycoon with seemingly more money than brains had purchased for $1 million and donated to the museum.

The alleged “work of art” is truly mind-boggling, and the look of utter disbelief on the face of one woman in the photo pretty much sums up the deal for me. “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, my dear,” I want to say to her. “I don’t get it, either.” (Nor, for that matter, I suspect, does the gesticulating woman at your side who appears to be explaining how the masterpiece is a brilliant metaphor for mankind’s eternal struggle to understand the meaning of life.)

Titled “Black,” the piece is simply a square of canvas painted jet black and enclosed within a plain-Jane wood frame. No subtle tones of gray. No subliminal suggestions of anything whatsoever as it hangs there on the wall for the art snobs to gush over and pretend to understand.

Just deepest, darkest black.

Inside-of-an-old-boot-at-midnight black.

Day-old-Navy-coffee black.

The caption under the photo explains that the 1913 painting, “which became one of the symbols of avant-garde art, belonged to the Inkombank, which went bankrupt. Russian tycoon Vladimir Potanin donated $1 million to the state to buy it from the bank’s creditors.” Small wonder the bank went under. One can only hope that old Vladimir won’t follow suit when, inevitably, “White,” say, or “Burnt Orange” goes on the auction block and the snobs fall all over themselves to become the proud owner.

Paying a million bucks for a small piece of black canvas is among the dumber things most normal people can imagine, I suppose. But it is not necessarily the dumbest, as I was reminded when I dropped the clipping into the “U-For-Unbelievable” file and spotted a story from the Wall Street Journal of a couple of years ago.

Datelined Van Nuys, Calif., the story tells about the Me Generation’s obsession with hubcapless, one-piece chrome wheels, or “rims.”

“Kristy Turner lived four days with her 1994 Ford Mustang’s ugly plastic hubcaps. That was enough,” begins the article by WSJ reporter Maureen Tkacik.

“On the fifth day, armed with three of her boyfriend’s pay stubs, a bank statement and the names of five friends as references, the unemployed 29-year-old mother of three drove the hour and a half from the desert town of Lancaster to his clogged strip in suburban Los Angeles. Here, she outfitted her new used-car with a set of gleaming, $57-a-week, rent-to-own chrome wheels. If she makes timely payments for the next 52 weeks, every 11th payment will be forgiven.

“In the end, Ms. Turney will have paid $2,736 for a set of $1,800 wheels. That’s well over half the Blue Book value of the car itself…”

The key phrases that leap out of that account to produce a look of disbelief on my countenance rivaling that of the Russian art patron ogling “Black” are “unemployed 29-year old mother of three” and “$57-a-week, rent-to-own chrome wheels.”

Slapping some black paint on a piece of canvas, calling it art, and selling it to some rich dude for a million bucks is not an idea I would have come up with, to be honest about it. Ditto, paying $500 for a junker and buying $3,000 rims for it, the more so were I without gainful employment and had three little kids hanging on to my leg.

Surely, both are pretty good examples of what is popularly known as thinking outside the box. Still, neither can match Bright Idea Number One that a Chesapeake, Va., jail inmate had in 1995, as my clip file shows. The prisoner claimed he had violated his own civil rights by getting arrested, and filed a $5 million lawsuit against himself. Then he asked the state to pay because, being in jail, he had no income.

Nice try, said Judge Rebecca Beach Smith, in tossing this baby out with the bath water. But I don’t think it will fly, Big Guy.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.