If you can’t find the line between art and commerce at Ikea, it doesn’t exist.

Mark Malkoff lives at Ikea, and it’s awesome.  The New York comedian and audience coordinator at The Colbert Report somehow persuaded the Swedish furniture monolith to let him camp out in its Paramus, N.J., store this week and post the whole thing on YouTube, since none of his friends had a floor he could crash on while his apartment was being fumigated.  (Someone needs to fumigate that premise, by the way -- the believability termites have gotten to it.)

“Mark Lives in Ikea” is reminiscent of the children’s classic “From the Mixed up files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler,” where a brother and sister run away to the Met for a week, bathe in the fountains, and sleep in the museum’s antique beds.

But the beds at Ikea are brand-spanking new, and there’s a whole lot more cool stuff to play with. On his first day, Malkoff sets up camp in one of the store’s tricked-out model living units -- the place has everything: a nonworking plasma TV, a nonworking oven range, and cabinets stocked with plastic food.

“An apartment like this in New York City would cost $3,000 a month” he says proudly. 

These movie-slash-commercials are a strange new genre -- the opposite of product placement, where a can of Coke appears on a table in the background.  Now the commercial is the foreground, and it’s the art that’s the furniture. 

In fact, Malkoff has come up with a pretty good hypercommercialization metaphor -- pretty soon, maybe we’ll all be living at Ikea.