The Pompidou Center in Paris has just opened a “radical and unprecedented” art show called “Void,” an exhibition of nothing. Empty rooms. Bare white walls. Nothing except exit signs and wall detritus like thermostats and light fixtures to attract the viewer’s gaze and provoke thought. About what? Well, that’s up to you.

Monday’s article on the show in the UK’s Guardian quotes the artist, Robert Barry, as saying the purpose of an exhibition on emptiness is to let us “be free for a moment to think about what we are going to do.” Well, it just so happens that “What are we going to do?” is the question of the day—in fact, it’s the $700+ billion dollar question. And for me, it begs another question about appropriate velocities—the speed of everything once we dust off this current mess of meltdowns and bailouts.

Gimmick or not, perhaps “Void” is the perfect provocation for finding time—and the space which is what the “art” is trying to give us—to pay attention to a new order emerging. Designers are trained to have a keen sense of this: And of designing early warning systems to help us detect what’s coming down the road and what might be, for the time being and for most people, just out of view.

Barry is known for focusing his art on the interstitial—the space in between, on nothing. He has said: “Nothing seems to be the most important thing in the world.” I’m not sure that’s true and don’t have the qualifications—or the bandwidth now—to debate this artistry. But if nothing gives us time to rethink where we are and where we’ll go—and especially, how’ll we get there—then I agree and would have to say that nothing is surely something.

Photo: The Guardian