Tino Sehgal’s show at the Guggenheim is the sort of thing that tends to put me on my guard. It has the whiff of emperor’s-new-clothes about it. It’s very susceptible to the my-kid-could-paint-that school of contemporary art skepticism, and performance art is so often not my cup of tea, and there’s a lot of buzz. So I was a teeny bit surprised to find myself turning to my very erudite friend Dave halfway up the rotunda and saying something along the lines of, “You know, I think I buy it.”

In the atrium, a very beautiful couple is performing a choreographed sexual encounter: intricate, measured, looping. (It’s also pretty hot: you secretly keep expecting them to actually take off their clothes.) There is nothing on the walls. It is apparently the first time in the Guggenheim’s history this has been the case. The people you encounter as you walk upwards along the rotunda get older: the first interlocutors are children; the last are elderly people. I think we could then read the atrium-dancers as the moment of conception, but that’s not necessary. In fact, I think too much thought here as to the specifics of the intention isn’t necessary, because of how much the piece itself prioritizes your own experience and not its design. It’s high-concept, sure, but it’s not pushy—that is to say, it’s genuine in its intentions towards you. It’s in good faith, and that’s really important to me in art in general, but I think particularly important in art that actively wants to make the viewer into a participant.

For me, this piece isn’t about the quality of the interactions themselves—a lot of people with more interest in performance or interactive art than I’ve got might disagree, but I think it’s about the fact of the interactions, and about their centrality. The blank walls turn you back on yourself. So much of what we do in museums has nothing to do with the art. It has to do with bouncing off the art and into the person or people we’re with, trying to learn something about them and ourselves and what’s between by parallax; it has to do with the crowd and the low, constant noise; it has to do with people-watching and with the way you relate to yourself, other people, strangers, the broader world. Museums are social, material, and interpersonal spaces. This piece is an endorsement (one might even say a celebration) of that fact. It obviates the excuse of art objects and focuses on their functions and effects.

It’s also a really pleasurable experience. It flatters the participant, to some extent, I think: it plays to your self-regard in the way it devotes itself to approaching you and drawing you out. Still, Dave and I had only one interaction of the designated kind (it was Sunday and pretty full, or, alternately, we are terrifyingly unapproachable, or, alternately, the child to whom we talked about Hegel when he asked us about progress rather reasonably put us on some sort of do-not-call list) and I found it really enjoyable just to walk slowly upwards and figure out the schema and check in on the progress of the atrium dance (at one point, a very small blond child tottered into the performative space and got very close to the dancers and seemed overawed) and watch the people around us having conversations.

There’s sort of a paradox to the piece: it seems to me to go a long way towards emphasizing the unnecessariness of art objects themselves, but of course, there isn’t an absence of art object—the piece itself is art, just not of a static, tangible kind. The concept is the object. You’re still processing it intellectually in much the same way you would process a more compartmentalized art object—and you need to be, for it to do its job of realigning your art-experience. So this is either a sort of half-measure (that is, a gesture in a direction that the piece can’t pursue to its logical conclusion) or a reconciliation to the fact of art as a premise: a necessary jumping-off point. I’m not sure it actually much matters which one of those things this piece is, though: it still works for me.