The Homeless Simulator is a roughly six-foot-high box of semitransparent plastic. It looks like a high-design porta-potty, with a low, horizontal hatch on the front to lift and crawl through rather than a vertical door. The prospect of entering is daunting, and not just because of the cramped space. The audio tour warns: “Please be advised that riding the simulator is not recommended for people with bipolar disorder or poverty-related depression.” Inside, there’s nothing but a vintage cake mixer with maybe forty cents’ worth of pennies in the mixer’s bowl. “To truly experience homeless simulation,” instructs the tour narrator, “swiftly turn the switch of the mixer onto speed ten and leave it on for at least ten seconds or up to twenty-four hours.”

The Homeless Simulator, “where the dream of making lots of dough is turned into a nightmare,” sits in the middle of the Homeless Museum, also known as HoMu BKLYN, in the main hall next to the café, en route to the curatorial department, and not far from the gift shop. Gray and white plaques mark the nearby high gallery, staff and security room, education department, and the membership office, located behind a closed door in the café. The museum does not keep regular hours, so visiting means dropping by on one of the open-house days, which occur at unpredictable intervals and are advertised mostly by word of mouth. On these occasions, HoMu’s director of development, Madame Butterfly, greets visitors dressed in a traditional kimono and wooden sandals. Her hospitality is graceful and genuine, even if she is the first sure sign that HoMu is not your average straight-faced arts organization. One look at the list of fellow board members posted near the entrance (Madame Tussaud, creative director; Robobum III, treasurer; and Florence Coyote, director of public relations) and Madame Butterfly suddenly seems less anomalous. After taking visitors’ coats, she equips them with portable CD players loaded with the audio tour.

Madame Butterfly’s buoyant voice narrates a history of the pieces surrounding the simulator in HoMu’s main collection: Birth of a New Museum, a somewhat graphic and literal depiction of the title, painted by museum director Filip Noterdaeme in his fledgling graduate school days; MoMA HMLSS; a series of miniature reproductions of works of art in the Museum of Modern Art, including Meret Oppenheim’s famous fur cup, Object, and Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel safely encased under Plexiglas after returning from a traveling exhibition; and a small model titled Captive Audience, a suggestion for other galleries and museums to line their floors with a powerful adhesive commonly used for trapping rodents in order to keep their visitors glued.

The next stop...