They Say A Party Can Kill You

Ah, 2020. What a year. This New Year’s Eve I’m thinking of a sculpture I saw years ago at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. “Milkstone” by Wolfgang Laib is a large square slab of white marble sitting on the floor of an empty room, rising just a few inches above the cement. At first, it seemed one of those all-too-clever echoes of Duchamp. But a tremor echoed across the surface of the marble — maybe someone walked across the room and the floor shook ever so slightly — and I realized that it wasn’t just marble; it was also milk. The marble slab is actually a shallow bowl and every few hours a…