It's a rare occasion—that Wow! moment—when art stops you dead in your tracks and makes you forget everything you thought you knew. I was struck dumb the first time I saw one of Cady Noland's corroded milk crates filled with useless automotive junk. No knowledge of Dada paved the way to that encounter or mitigated the powerful sense of abjection radiated by her distressed container, into which she had tossed a couple of Bud empties, some oilcans, and a "dead" rubber chicken. It wasn't the "shock of the new," as Robert Hughes described the riveting and alienating force of early-20th-century art. Rather, it was precisely because I thought I was on familiar ground that the rupture of the unexpected was so acute.


Fast-forward to Dia's Andy: Through the Lens of Patronage