Christian Marclay. Installation view of The Clock. 2010. Single-channel video with sound, 24 hours. White Cube’s Mason Yard, London, October 15-November 13, 2010. © Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and White Cube, London. Photo: Todd-White Photography.

For about a month, from just before Christmas through the third week in January 2013, screenings of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” overlapped with the survey exhibition “Inventing Abstraction: 1910–1925,” at the Museum of Modern Art.1It’s difficult to imagine two more different projects. “The Clock,” a brilliant piece of virtuoso editing, both visually and aurally, is essentially pure entertainment that requires little of its viewers but their time. Yes, the piece is a tour de force that provokes countless associations and makes us acutely conscious of the minutes inexorably passing and by extension—although this may depend on our age—acutely conscious of change and mortality. We recognize some actors and identify individual films; others elude us. We listen to snippets of dialogue in several languages, not all of them known to us. We notice the thematic threads associated with particular times of day—all those people eating between noon and one p.m., for example—and, without consciously willing it, construct vague narratives to try to make sense of the disjunctive but seamlessly connected scenes unreeling before us. We are aware that the orderly sequence that measures off the progress of real time is, in fact, a series of elaborately constructed fictions made even more unreal by being selected, sliced, and