Question Zero-I: 
Schmaradox Paradox

When faced with a paradox, one available strategy is to replace the initial consonant or consonant cluster of the paradox’s name with the schm-sound. Doing so rhetorically disarms the paradox by re-categorizing it as nonsense. Thus, the arrow paradox becomes the schmarrow paradox; the liar paradox becomes the schmiar paradox; and so forth.

Paradoxically, this rhetorical sidestep doesn’t work for the word schmaradox, for replacing the initial consent cluster of Schmaradox results in the same word: Schmaradox. 

What is the solution to the Schmaradox Paradox?

Question Zero-II: 
Lexical Camouflage

The Samsun Ram is an object that does not want to be found. This terracotta figurine of a horned sheep was discovered in Samsun, an ancient port on the Black Sea, and is now in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum. While there is no record of the figurine being moved or missing, every attempt to locate it has failed on account of its name—a side effect of sophisticated search engines autocorrecting "Samsun" as a misspelling of the Korean corporation Samsung (exacerbated by actual misspellings of Samsung as "Samsun"), while the associated “Ram” is presumed to be the abbreviation of random access memory and not the farm animal. Your search engine light is on.

Can you find another object hidden in lexical camouflage, another Samsun Ram?

Question Zero-III: 
Elementary School

The ancient Greeks believed in five fundamental elements: earth, water, air, fire, and aether. The Vedas describe the same basic five. The Chinese, on the other hand, historically replace air and aether with wood and metal. In each case it is believed that all physical objects are comprised of some combination of these fundamental elements, differentiated only by the proportion and manner of their combination. Similarly, it is widely accepted that the contemporary art world is composed of five fundamental elements, specifically: holy shit, bullshit, bat shit, ape shit, and shit. And while the discovery and schematization of the atomic elements, by Mendeleev and others, has supplanted the five-elements worldview, the contemporary art world still clings to its five-fold scatology. 

How would you brand a detachment of portapotties outside an art fair?

Question Zero-IV: 
Rabbit-Duck

The Rabbit-Duck Illusion is an ambiguous image, which can be viewed either as a picture of a duck or as a picture of a rabbit. Imagine that the following are similarly ambiguous images: 

How many pictures are on this page?

Question Zero-V: 
Origins of the Trophy War

There was a moment in Western Europe, a mirage of time in the middle of the 19th century, when everything an artist needed to know could be taught and practiced like a skill. How well a painter could render human musculature, for example, or depict a classical myth was, in this moment, a matter of public record, demonstrable to a classically-trained audience, that was sensitive to the gamut of painterly techniques and thirsty for a special blend of idealism, virtuosity, and verisimilitude, an audience that could evaluate a painting the way Olympic judges evaluate a figure skating routine. Nowadays, it is recounted, that the most successful artists are those who make and inscribe golden apples.

What is written on your golden apple?

Question Zero-VI: 
Not Rhetorical

When answering a question it is important to be clear, direct, and accurate. A clearer, more direct, and more accurate answer is better than one that is less so, regardless of how difficult a question may be, provided the question is answerable/knowable in the first place. This is not to suggest that:

1. What counts as a better answer won’t vary contextually and from person to person;
2. Metrics exist to empirically evaluate given answers in terms of their units of clarity or accuracy percentiles; or
3. Best answers exist.

What do you do? 

Question Zero-VII: 
Members Discount

It is easy to imagine a work of art that was once costly but is now trifling. Nothing about the artwork proper need change, only the context in which it is appraised. Now attempt to imagine a meaningful work of art that becomes meaningless. Is this possible—not only the feat of imagining something losing its meaning entirely but whether a person can experience the quality of meaninglessness in a thing at all? The work of art is itself unchanged. No painting was obliterated in the posing of this prompt. The sculpture is still regarded as sculpture, not as a paperweight or scrap bronze. And the art in question is still experienced; it has not not been ignored or overlooked. Before you hazard an answer to whether or not such an object is possible, first imagine a museum composed entirely of such objects: a collection of art beyond the event horizon of meaning. What does admission cost?

Question Zero-VIII:
The Diamond World and the Womb World

Someone has already completed your crossword puzzle, while your co-passengers in the adjoining seats sit throughly absorbed, inscribing answers in their copies of the perceptibly satisfying in-flight puzzle. You review the clues and answers the way a person smells an empty box of chocolates, hoping to still mitigate the passage of time. And then you notice: the answers are off. Not wrong, per say, for the inscribed words effectively answer the clues provided; the words are spelled correctly and share intersecting letters the way crossword puzzles do. For the three-letter clue flightless bird, the answer should be emu, which should share its e with evolve, satisfying, in turn, the clue advance with time and interconnecting with other more-obvious-to-you answers puzzle-wide.

How do you contend with moa and mature, with the coherent ilk of coexisting solutions?

Question Zero-IX:
Diversifying One's Portfolio

Suppose an artwork with a perceivable sense that it will be meaningful to some future audience, like a musical composition containing microtonal sequences that are too complex and subtle to be perceived by ear yet accessible to a believable-enough future listener with bionic implants, which allow the aforementioned music to be enjoyed like a simple fugue, its patterns as plain as verse, chorus, verse. Let's call this quality in art 2nd-order meaningfulness. Now imagine 3rd-order meaningfulness: the artwork that was considered meaningful on account of its perceived future significance (i.e., 2nd-order meaningful), that turns out to interest its designated future audience only because some past audience thought it would be, like the graven image of a defunct faith.

How is Knothing 4th-order meaningful?

Question Zero-X:
The Birth of Trivia

One day, you will flatline and after which remember being suffused with unimaginable volumes of information, whole archives impressed instantaneously—all manner of factoid, the coordinates of every mote of space dust in each hydrogen cloud, the universe conveyed to its statistical exhaustion, however esoteric or seemingly unknowable. Upon being revived, though, you only recall four things:

1. Amelia Earhart’s plane incinerated upon reentry to the atmosphere;
2. The fittest organism on Earth will be ant-lichen zooids in the Apokaluptikozoic;
3. I will have always loved you; and

What was the fourth and final remembered thing?