I don't go to shopping malls very often. And so when I do go, I tend to feel like an anthropologist.. Or as if I've stepped into an episode of The Simpsons. On my most recent mall expedition a couple of weekends ago in New York's Hudson Valley, I discovered a chain store I'd never heard of called It's On TV.

At It's On TV, they sell merchandise that has been advertised on TV - on inexpensive TV, late at night or weekends, nothing but goofy, non-brand-name household products advertised on television infomercials.

So at It's On TV you can buy an Ionic Pet Brush, Miracle Blade, and Thigh Master. It's like a home shopping channel come to life. And the store I visited was packed with people who seemed to be examining the gadgets and tonics they recognized -- from TV! -- with an odd combination of reverence and irreverence, as if the Epil-Stop & Spray Hair Remover was some kind of minor celebrity putting in a surprise appearance at the local Galleria.

A few minutes later, outside the Lenscrafters store, a nice woman carrying a clipboard approached and asked if I wanted to help with her market-research study. I had about an hour to kill ("Glasses in about an hour!"), so I decided to go with the day's commercial flow.

She sat me down and her surly colleague showed me four mockups of prospective DVD packages for Pirates of the Caribbean.

The guy asked if I'd seen the movie.

No, I told him - but I had seen the TV commercials for the movie.

He asked which of the four DVD boxes I'd be most likely to buy.

I told him my answer was hypothetical, since I probably wouldn't be buying a Pirates of the Caribbean DVD -- but that package number 4 was my favorite.

Why? he asked.

Because it's the one without the big Walt Disney logo on the front, I told him.

He seemed to get surlier, and told me I was free to go.

Maybe my experience at It's On TV had put me in some kind of anti-name-brand mood.

Anyhow, when I got home that night, I had an excited email from a friend telling me about a new TV commercial for the Honda Accord which, from his description, sounded like a work of art. The ad was British, but I could see it on the internet.

So there I was, after a day exploring a store based on TV commercials and helping Disney refine their forthcoming marketing campaign for DVD, spending my free time at home downloading a TV commercial from the internet.

But it turned out the Honda ad is indeed artful and awesome. It's a 2-minute-long film with no words spoken for the first minute and 55 seconds. The camera pans across a vast Rube Goldberg contraption consisting of pieces of a disassembled Accord station wagon as the contraption does its Rube Goldberg thing.

A cog rolls down an inclined plane and hits another cog, and on and on: tires hitting tires on a seesaw, seats folding up, oil spilling, a fan switched on, a muffler rolling over, windshield wipers dancing, the stereo blasting, all resolving in a perfect delightful climax, with the single line of narration provided by Garrison Keillor: "Isn't it nice when things work?"

I watched the ad online again and again. It is an extraordinary stunt and deeply entertaining, as close to greatness as you're likely to see in a piece of filmmaking produced for television. And the second or third time I watched it, it also struck me as somehow… familiar.

Then I realized why: it was very much like another film of another Rube Goldbergian folly I'd loved when I saw it years ago, a brilliant performance piece called "The Way Things Go" by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Theirs was a 30-minute work of art -- a work of art that has now, 16 years later, undoubtedly inspired this new 2-minute Honda commercial.
And that is why they call it "pop culture."

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