All hail Peter Schjeldahl, writing here on James Turrell:

As with Irwin, you register the unreliability of your vision, only with a bonus of beauty, replete with associations to music, savor, and scent. (No texture, though. Your meditative state is out-of-body, touchless.) Again, succumbing is optional. I have often resisted and even resented the blandishments of Light and Space art, whose oh-wow effects come with an intimation that the viewer has been cast as a laboratory animal. In this, I'm a New Yorker. In public places here, we are normally averse to letting our egos dissolve like sugar cubes in hot tea. In amniotic L.A., everybody goes around half-deliquesced already, as a matter of course. ... If, as a visitor there, you don't smoothly adapt, you may be as noisily wretched as Woody Allen in "Annie Hall." Practice the proper adjustment with works of California minimalism.

Peter Schjeldahl, " Way Out West." The New Yorker, 25 Jan 2010 (subscription required for online access, alas).

In usual fashion, every sentence adds a new layer of awesome.

I've felt the same way about some of Turrell's pieces—like a lab rat—but one of his blue rooms that was installed at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle in 2002 was for me a blissfully transporting experience. I had the sense of standing, with others, behind an ethereal waterfall, like in a movie's dreamy interlude, maybe representing a temporary afterlife. It was the kind of installation that made strangers blink and smile at one another.

In this connection, I want to note the Anish Kapoor piece at the Guggenheim right now. Approaching it from one side, you see what appears to be an enormous rusty steel egg that consumes a whole gallery, wall to wall. It's an interesting gesture in its own right, because of the rusty texture, the monumental weight, and the urgency of this thing apparently pressing at the edges of the gallery, as if wanting to grow out of it. But from the other side you find it has a rectangular opening onto another hermetic white gallery room: an opening on which, like one of Turrell's sky spaces, you can't see the edges, and hence the depth behind it appears in line with the surface. So it appears to be a black rectangle painted on the wall, and yet you sense it is hollow, it echoes sound, and you strain to see in the incredible blackness the inside of the urgent steel egg.