City Critic: A 150,000-Pound Hand-Me-Down. Yay?

Same response if the offer was for 499,000 first-generation iPhones or 11,000 broken toaster ovens, all of which would also weigh about 150,000 pounds. Yet the other day, when the city got word that another 150,000-pound castoff was headed this way, moderate rejoicing broke out.

The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum was awarded custody of the Enterprise, the space shuttle that, until now, had been on display at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington. The Smithsonian is going to get one of the newly retired space shuttles (one of the real ones; read on) and so is magnanimously regifting this one. It is to go on display near the great ship, which, come to think of it, is another federal hand-me-down.

I’m not for a minute suggesting that the Intrepid, an aircraft carrier with a distinguished record of service in war and in peace, is anything less than a credit to Pier 86. The Enterprise, though, is a bit of a downgrade; it’s a prototype that never actually flew in space, never docked with anything and never harbored Sigourney Weaver and slimy parasitic aliens. From there it’s just a short step to federal junk with no historic value at all — misprinted tax forms, past-date hardtack, obsolete nuclear missiles.

Nor am I saying that the thing won’t attract tourists, because, as 18 years’ worth of “Cats” proved, tourists will apparently pay to see just about anything. It’s just the precedent I’m worried about, especially now, when Washington politicians are eager to get rid of any evidence of their wasteful ways.

But, you’re saying, 20 other suitors were going after the Enterprise and the three real shuttles (which went to Cape Canaveral, Fla; Los Angeles; and Washington). Could all of them really have been hoodwinked? Are the feds really smart enough to fool that many people into vying for the right to take government discards? Remember, this is NASA we’re talking about; these folks put men on the moon back when most Americans still had black-and-white televisions and thought that electric can openers were the pinnacle of technological achievement. Yeah, they’re smart enough.

Not to worry, though. If the federal government is going to make a habit of dumping its castoffs here, we have people who can turn that into a positive. They’re called artists.

Lots of artists create the old-fashioned way, by painting, taking a photograph or hiring models to stand naked in the Museum of Modern Art, but there’s a subset of them who make art out of other people’s throwaways.

“Trash speaks to me,” Barbara Lubliner of Manhattan, one such artist, told me by way of explaining how to go about turning junk into art. “It says: ‘I’ve got potential. Give me new context. Keep me around until you can vision me in a new life.’?”

Ms. Lubliner is among more than 50 artists contributing to an exhibition opening this weekend at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn called “Art From Detritus: Upcycling With Imagination,” in which all the works are made from recycled materials and trash. Figuring that you’ve got to have a sense of humor to make artwork out of trash, I asked a few of these artists to ruminate both on what it takes to turn junk into something someone might want to look at and on what they would do with a used space shuttle if given one.

“I’d use it as an art studio,” Ms. Lubliner said. Bernard Klevickas, a sculptor in Long Island City, Queens, whose work is also in the show, was equally utilitarian. “Start a community garden in it,” he said. “The bay doors could be removed and a greenhouse roof installed for the winter season. The shuttle would in essence become a giant planter.”

And then there’s Chris Noel, who makes what he calls debris paintings using detritus of various sorts. He’s not part of the Williamsburg show and lives in Maryland. So what’s he doing in this column? He lived for years in Virginia, one of the states where New York has been dumping its trash for some time. And so, as an oblique what-goes-around-comes-around gesture, I’m giving him the last word, to relate what he’d do with a discarded shuttle.

“Maybe I would convert it into a land yacht and tour the country,” Mr. Noel said. “Along the way, I would ask all those I came in contact with to make their mark on it in some way, no matter how large or small. I would travel until there was not a speck of unmarked space, and then I would park it and declare it finished. I don’t think an item as significant as this should be entrusted to any one individual. This should be the people’s art. Then you either park it or send it into space for its final voyage, never to return.

“O.K., that’s kind of thick with peace, love and harmony,” he added, “but maybe that’s not so bad.”

E-mail: metropolitan@nytimes.com

Ariel Kaminer is on leave.