Some time ago I wrote a very short blog post called Having Sex with Artists. I had dreamed that I had sex with Frank Stella under a boardwalk on Fire Island. Not long after that, Anish Kapoor turned up in another dream, this time courting me.

Harold Bloom called it the anxiety of influence. I called it having sex with artists.

Apparently Kapoor had already made his way into my subconscious.

Now that I have been looking at black paintings, I have a more respectable reason to think about him.

When I was a child, I took art lessons at the Museum of Modern Art. After class I would go through the collection. I did this every week, so certain paintings became almost like acquaintances.

I remember the first time I came across one of Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings. My first reaction was more or less: WTF.

I can’t remember now for sure, but there may have been a Larry Bell box nearby and possibly a white painting by Robert Ryman. I may be telescoping different visits. Bell’s glass box, which glistened like a gas leak, was a helpful comparison. It had already made me alert to the surface. Reinhardt’s painting seemed to be doing something entirely different.

So what was it?