In one of Jorge Luis Borges’s best-known short stories, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a 20th-century French writer sets out to compose a verbatim copy of Cervantes’s 17th-century masterpiece simply because he thinks he can, originality perhaps not being all it’s cracked up to be.

When a young Turkish artist named Serkan Ozkaya set out recently to practice his skills as a copyist — a scrivener, as he says — his goals were a little less ambitious than channeling Cervantes. He simply wanted to draw and see printed a faithful copy of all the type and pictures planned for a broadsheet page of this newspaper: this very page you are reading right now, which shows his version of the page you are reading right now, which shows his version of his version of the page you are reading right now, which. . . .

Do not be alarmed: There has been no break in the space-time-newsprint continuum.

Mr. Ozkaya, a 33-year-old artist who lives and works in Istanbul, did not propose this exercise in handmade surrealism because of a particular love of calligraphy or newspapers or, for that matter, even drawing, which he admits he is not very good at. The project grew out of a fascination, one shared by many contemporary artists, with the interplay between the idea of the original and the copy in an ever more mass-produced postmodern world.

The results of Mr. Ozkaya’s work — specifically, copies of this page and the drawing he made of it, which you saw reprinted with the beginning of this article — are featured in an exhibition called “Altered, Stitched and Gathered” that opened yesterday at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens, with pieces by more than two dozen artists who have replicated, reconfigured, reconstituted and in one case, flattened with a steamroller, the stuff of everyday life.

The show, organized by Christopher Y. Lew, Erica Papernik and Elna Svenle, members of P.S. 1’s curatorial assistant staff, explores both how the ordinary — a boatload of Ikea plastic clothes hangers, for example — can become art and, specifically in Mr. Ozkaya’s case, how art can be made into the ordinary, hundreds of thousands of copies of it printed, some soon to become the proverbial fish wrapping or bird-cage liner.

Mr. Ozkaya’s preoccupation with questions of authenticity began early, when he was growing up in Istanbul, he said. Before he studied at Bard College and completed a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, he learned about Western art and especially modern and contemporary art in his native country mostly through books, many of them with bad reproductions, which he then photocopied, making even worse reproductions. “You always felt like you were disconnected from the real thing,” he said in a recent interview in Queens.

But in his development as an artist, that remove was not necessarily a bad thing. It often helped him see that “the real thing,” especially if it was well enough known, had usually been copied so many times that it became difficult for anyone truly to see it anymore.

One of his first acts as a young artist was to send a letter to the Louvre, proposing that the museum display the Mona Lisa upside down for a few days so that observers could consider it once again as a painting, not simply an image that has sunken deeply into their visual DNA. He kept the museum’s reply, in which officials politely thanked him for sending a letter and made no mention of his proposal. (Perhaps appropriately, Mr. Ozkaya said, he later came across the same turning-masterpieces-upside-down idea in writings from the 1970s by the American artist Paul McCarthy. “You can never do anything original,” he said, smiling.)

Last year, for the Istanbul Biennale, Mr. Ozkaya worked on another copying project, this time using an exact three-dimensional computer model of Michelangelo’s David to recreate the statue in plastic foam, though his copy was twice as large as the original and painted gold, as a way of “improving” it. As the statue was being raised for the biennale, unfortunately, it collapsed under its own weight. “It was horrible,” Mr. Ozkaya said.

He tried to console himself by thinking of the collapse as part of the work, but it did no good. The most important part of the piece, he said, would have been people in Istanbul admiring the sculpture, “having this absurd relationship with this beautiful thing, this art thing, that is just a cheap copy.”

In the same way, he said, his newspaper projects — he has collaborated on similar pages with newspapers in Turkey, Germany and Sweden — are about the experience of readers picking up the paper and seeing art interposed between them and their expectations. He said he also sees the hand-drawn pages as performing the traditional labor of art: drawing from life.

“A newspaper is history, one-a-day history,” he said. “It’s our memory of what happened. So to make a drawing of it, to make a simulation of it, is what art always does: to mimic life, to mimic what is real.” Though in his case, of course, it’s a drawing of a copy of a version of what happened, holding a mirror up to nature with a refraction or two in between.

In a way that mixes Borges with a dollop of Jean Baudrillard and a heavy helping of Walter Benjamin, the work also upends ideas about copies being less valuable than originals. Readers of this page might be less likely to wrap their fish in it, perhaps seeing it as an art-world keepsake. And the drawing of the page itself could end up, someday, in a collection or museum.

As you might expect, Mr. Ozkaya loves tumbling into the rabbit holes his work can open up and pulling others along with him. When he did a similar newspaper project in 2003 for the Turkish daily Radikal, drawing two pages that were then printed in full, the hand-copied pages included a small fake news item written by Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel-Prize-winning novelist. Mr. Pamuk referred to a fictional newspaper he had created in his novel, “Snow,” a newspaper that printed news that had not yet happened.

The “news item” in Radikal reported that the presses of Mr. Pamuk’s fictional newspaper had broken, necessitating hand-copying of the same sort Radikal readers were then witnessing.

It turns out to be a strange thing to interview someone for a newspaper article who you know will then hand-copy some of that article before it is printed, including some of the sentences he is just then uttering. During the interview that afternoon at P.S. 1, Mr. Ozkaya and this reporter talked admiringly about Borges and his “Pierre Menard” short story, giving the reporter the idea of mentioning the story in the article while at the same instant knowing that Mr. Ozkaya would later transcribe the words, reminding him of the discussion during the interview.

The entire transaction might have been the plot of a lost Borges story, and the title could well have been the one that Mr. Ozkaya is giving to his work at P.S. 1: “Today Could Be a Day of Historical Importance.”

In some ways the whole conceit was also a little comforting. If the reporter happened to misspell Mr. Ozkaya’s name in the article, he could easily correct it in his drawing.

But then again, would he?