Why David Hammons’s Elusive Art Continues to Intrigue, Mystify, and Provoke

In 2002, David Hammons invited people to come to a New York gallery and admire a whole lot of nothing. For a now-famous piece called Concerto in Black and Blue (2002), visitors to Ace Gallery were given tiny flashlights that, when turned on, emitted a blue light. They journeyed into the pitch-black gallery and explored 20,000 square feet of space. What visitors slowly realized, moving through the show, was that there was not a single art object on view. There was, in other words, not much to see