We like to believe that Shia LaBeouf knows exactly what we’re doing: that his seemingly bizarre performance art…

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[embed]https://player.vimeo.com/video/125095515?color=ffffff&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0[/embed]

…is a reaction to the vapid world of celebrity, an attempt to derail an entertainment news industry that runs on mindless junkets and marketing campaigns by confronting us with something new. As a celebrity, he knows idiots like us are going to write about him, but he sure as hell isn’t going to make it easy, and we respect him for that.

But then he spends a day riding in a lift, and we must admit, we’re lost.

Oxford University Union invited LaBeouf to give a talk on Saturday, but he insisted on staying in the elevator for the 12 hours before and afterwards. The performance was live streamed on YouTube under the hashtag #Elevate.

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(Considering he was in England, that should really have been #Lift.)

Members of the public, some of whom had waited for eight hours, got the opportunity to make small talk with the Transformers star, along with his frequent artistic collaborators Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner.

According to the New York Times, the most frequent question he was asked was “why are you in a lift?”

“It’s a weird thing,” he admitted to one guest.

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Quite.

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