Across the winter and spring of 1960-1961, Yoko Ono presented a series of concerts and performances by different artists in a loft she was renting in downtown Manhattan at 112 Chambers Street. That was a grungy, exotic address back then, at least where art and music were concerned. (Today it’s just a five-minute walk from Vanity Fair’s spiffy new offices!) Ono for her part was a relatively obscure conceptual artist and avant-garde musician, unknown outside of rarefied cultural circles, five years away from meeting John Lennon and becoming the world’s most famous conceptual artist and avant-garde musician.

The printed programs for the loft performances she hosted are among the less interesting documents on display at “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971,” an extensive exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculptures, artifacts, films, music, and sound, which opened at the Museum of Modern Art this month, but one detail caught my eye and crystalized my thinking about the show. A note on the program for an evening of pieces by Ono’s then husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi, warned, “The purpose of this series is not entertainment.” I’m guessing that self-serious statement wasn’t meant ironically in 1961, but it struck me that way in 2015 because Ono’s best work is testament that entertainment and thoughtful, provocative art aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re good for each other—a truism today, but a radical proposition in some eras, including the one that launched Ono.

Ono’s most quintessential single work is probably Grapefruit, the book of more than 150 “instructions” for “pieces” that she first self-published in 1964. (Reissued by Simon & Schuster in 1970, with a forward by Lennon, it became a cult best-seller.) Here is Collecting Piece II in its entirety: “Break a contemporary museum into pieces with the means you have chosen. Collect the pieces and put them together again with glue.” Here is Stone Piece: “Find a stone that is your size or weight. Crack it until it becomes fine powder. Dispose of it in the river. (a) Send small amounts to your friends. (b) Do not tell anybody what you did. Do not explain about the powder to the friends to whom you send.”

Democratizing art and art-making is one of Ono’s aims, and the great thing about these works, aside from their wit, is that—unlike a Roy Lichtenstein painting or a Jeff Koons sculpture—they’re just as effective here on VF.com as they are in the old copy of Grapefruit someone’s selling on a table on Broadway, or hung and framed on MoMA’s walls. Are they conceptual art? Poetry? Jokes with sting? All of the above? Any form of art involves interplay between creator and consumer, but one of the distinctive pleasures of Ono’s is that she dumps more responsibility than most in the latter’s lap. I like to think of her work as mental smelling salts.

Or dares. Precursors to Grapefruit were the instructional paintings Ono exhibited in the early 60s, including Smoke Painting (1961), in which gallery-goers were asked to burn holes in a canvas with cigarettes until it disappeared, and Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961), which you can see below in a selfie I took:

Also, the category worth venturing to MoMA for (and not just reading about) is Bag Piece (1964), which consists of a low white platform wedged into a corner of the museum and a large black, human-size sack. Visitors can perform Bag Piece by crawling into the sack (with the help of a facilitator) and rolling around on the platform, or not, as you see fit. I found that I quite enjoyed doing a few stretching exercises in front of dozens of spectators while hidden, paradoxically, from view. Give Ono credit for pioneering the anonymous exhibitionism enjoyed by millions today on social media.

(You can half-see through the sack’s cloth so performing Bag Piece isn’t dangerous; in fact, the sack is pretty soft and comfy, even cozy, and I found myself wanting to commandeer it for my own Nap Piece.)

For obvious reasons, Ono’s music is far better known (if not often listened to) than her work in other media—to my taste an unfortunate imbalance. Fame has been both help and hindrance to this artist, spotlight and eclipse, bringing her a large audience but at the same time fixing her in much of the public’s mind as Lennon’s wacky, sometimes irritating appendage. That’s an obviously unfair perception, fueled in some measure by sexism, racism, Beatle-fan possessiveness, and Lennon’s own ego; putting that perception to rest is one of One Woman Show’s not quite explicitly stated aims. (By the way, the notion that “Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles” has as much truth, I think, as saying that “Monica Lewinsky impeached Bill Clinton.”) All the same, would MoMA have given Ono as lavish a show as this one if she hadn’t been a Beatle wife, and would it have been as crowded as it was when I visited on a recent Tuesday afternoon? Probably not: three floors down, the historic exhibition of Jacob Lawrence’s complete 60-painting Migration Series was more sparsely attended (not that it’s a competition).

Possibly to counter the celebrity factor, the Ono exhibition huffs and puffs a bit. Is she really an artist whose “profound achievements . . . changed our vision of the world,” as the curators, Klaus Biesenbach and Christophe Cherix, insist in the exhibition catalogue? Does the show benefit much from a wall devoted to those Chambers Street Loft Series programs, other than to remind us that Ono was a catalyst for an important performance scene that included John Cage? It’s filler, though nostalgists over the age of 45 will appreciate that the programs were printed on ditto machines; unfortunately, they’re framed and behind glass, so you can’t sniff their purple-y chemical goodness that way you did when your third-grade teacher handed out work sheets.

As you enter the MoMA galleries, one of the first works on display is Apple (1966), which looks to be an actual Granny Smith of recent vintage placed on top of a clear Plexiglas stand with a small brass plaque that reads “APPLE.” Nearby is a wall text that states, in part, “As the transparent base recedes into space, Ono shifts attention away from the presentation of the art object to the passage of time marked by the apple’s decay and periodic renewal as it is replaced throughout the course of the exhibition. The brass plaque affixed to the pedestal serves as a counterpoint to the impermanence of the fruit.” True all that, but Apple isn’t a work that needs much explanation—anyone who’s heard of Duchamp or Warhol will get it—and if Apple needs anyone to speak for it, Ono’s own words, from 1966, are far more evocative and droll: “There is the excitement of watching the apple decay, and the decision as to whether to replace it, or just thinking of the beauty of the apple after it’s gone.”

The London gallery where Ono debuted Apple was where John Lennon first encountered her work. He thought Apple—asking price: £200—was “pretty funny,” as he later recalled, cutting to the chase like any good songwriter. I agree. Most of Ono’s art is pretty funny, her cleverness rarely arch or smug but leavened, rather, by generosity of spirit. Hers is a rare, embracing wit, a wit to be savored and—no sin, people of 1961—enjoyed.