Marc Kokopeli at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

(link)

"Like the drug smuggler casting his contraband in the shape of Jesus to escape the prying eyes, [artists] recast trash as flimsy endearing objects that we are made to love. ... repackaging, a reincarnation, second life in the only way objects know how: camouflaging themselves as fresh commodities. "

"Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife, a means of delivering them to the majority white institutions to get them to care for them in perpetuity."

Diaper cakes. Why recast your gift as a cake? Because the content isn't nice enough to be product/gift. This is an apt metaphor for art. The form (cake) is pretty far from function (shit napkins). So you jazz it up. This is the compositionalization of art. The diaper giver and the artist (or drug smuggler) - they must stealth their package into a societally acceptable object. You abstract the content.  Of course this is actually the new form, a socially compressed oddity, but we don't treat it as that. We think, press release on, "ooh 'a German bucket wheel excavator, used for industrial coal mining.'"