For a piece entitled "This Progress," Sehgal emptied the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim of its art: the visitor ascending the ramp was met by a small child, who asks you to explain what you think progress is. You do this as best you can; there's a back and forth, and this conversation carries on up the spiral. At a certain point, you're met by a high school student, who continues the conversation; then a young adult; and finally an older adult, who walks with you to the top-most point in the Guggenheim. There's a great deal of careful choreography going on, so the conversation breaks and remakes itself across your offerent interlocutors – but what's centrally interesting about the piece is that the visitor is engaged in a sustained conversation with strangers about the idea of progress. There's something deeply strange about this: post-college, we so rarely engage in conversations about abstract ideas. It's equally odd to be engaging with people who aren't your age: the way on talks to a six-year-old is necessarily different from the way one talks to a sixty-year-old. This can be deeply engrossing: on a visit a few Mondays ago, my friend Nik and I went up (with others) and down (together) five times in four hours.
