Who says you can’t make art from sardines?

When Max Robert Daily ran Oslo Sardine Bar inside Logan Heights’ Bread & Salt art center, visitors would ask, “Is this art?” Fair question. Now that he’s setting up in a Seaport Village storefront, the question he hears more often is, “Is this a joke?” Again, fair question. The signs in the window are straight out of a supermarket circular, except the word “Fresh” has been crossed out of “Fresh Fish, 99 cents,” the tinned tuna is billed as “Pre-Fukushima,” and the word “Expired” in “Expired Sardine Cans” has been replaced with “Antiqued.” “We’ll stand outside and invite people in, but they don’t trust us,” says Daily. “And if they do come in, they keep waiting for the reveal, until they realize, ‘Oh, you really are just selling sardines!’”

Granted, even that could be seen as a high-concept joke: a bar devoted to serving cans of tiny fish from overseas hard by the spot where San Diego’s tuna fisherman unload their fresh, comparatively enormous catches. You’re paying to dine on bait fish! But it’s not a joke, not really. “I want to turn this into a real thing,” says Daily. “I saw little places like this all over the place while I was traveling in Spain and France. I’d walk in, and it was all color,” thanks in large part to the packaging. “I thought, ‘I want to get into this,’ and the only way I knew how was art.”

Max Robert Daily tending his bar.

The Bread & Salt installation won him a San Diego Art Prize, which was enough to get him on tour in a crate-sized establishment: New York, Miami, Santa Fe. After that, the Port invited him to set up shop as part of the Village’s Thursday night Seaport Sessions, running from 5 pm-8 pm. (Also included: free live music and community-minded talks. Do go visit.) Opines Daily, “I think this is the middle step between the Bread & Salt installation and something like a craft beer bar, but with just two beers — light and dark — and a huge array of fish.” Daily may be an artist, but artists have to eat, and he’s got King Oscar brand sardines acting as a patron. “They said, ‘We don’t know how you’re getting people to eat sardines, but you are.’”

Not even the signage is entirely whimsical. “Like fine wine, sardines improve with age,” says Daily as I fork up a mellow, meltingly tender hunk of Portuguese sardine ($10) and let the lemony olive oil it was packed in drip off before easing it onto my cracker. “The French call it antiquing. They don’t open the tin until it’s past the expiration date.” I don’t check mine.

Instead, I pay my five cents — well, four; maître d’ Ryan Severance covers my shortfall — and seek more conventional thrills: crawling through a hatch in the wall into the darkened room that houses the bar’s electric shark. Well, shark lit by electricity. “Richard Dreyfus from Jaws gave it to us,” says Daily. He’s still not joking.