The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 333

Hammons's art is a reclamation project of sorts; he revalues bits of street flotsam and other unwanted debris by assembling them in new combinations. High Falutin', one of his several works based on the basketball hoop, is a battered wood window frame atop a pole, crowned and fringed by ruffles of rubber tire, a subtly figural ensemble incongruously glamorized by fussy glass candelabra, which are wired to light up. The theme of light and energy reappears in the crinkled loop of wire around the frame, a cartoon electric current.

The practice of working with found objects has an ancestry in Surrealism, and Hammons acknowledges the influence of Marcel Duchamp, among others, but he also remarks, "I feel it is my moral obligation to try to graphically document what I feel socially." The urban society to which he is so attuned is crucially inflected by the presence of African Americans, and if Hammons admires basketball, it is as a game of which African Americans have made an "art of improvisation," "a whole other thing—ballet, theater." High Falutin', which was originally named Spirit Catcher, also relates to African traditions of masks and other spiritually protective sculpture. "Art," Hammons has said, "is a way to keep from getting damaged by the outside world, to keep the negative energy away. Otherwise you absorb it."