Where the gift shop was is now a great, light-filled space for art that greets you right as you enter the museum. Making an entrance counts. What a difference this is.

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The first installation is an inflatable blue swimming pool in the middle of the floor. In its water, floating dishes are sent clinking and chiming by currents circulated by an electrical pump. What you hear is the soft, breezy music of summer. The piece, by CĂ©leste Boursier-Mougenot, is a new acquisition for the museum's permanent collection, put out to inaugurate the new space.

Here's another version of it in action in Sao Paolo, where it was installed in several pools embedded directly in the floor.

The Henry version is more backyard-BBQ than sleek-modernist, similar to a version I ran into a couple of years ago in a sound art and sampling exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla. There, I remember three pools.

This single, isolated pool at the Henry, its circle of water reflecting the light coming through the windows above, is a counterpart to the museum's permanent Skyspace by James Turrell, which is just across the museum on the other side of the lobby. Both the pool and Turrell's oculus provide invitingly unsteady surfaces in which unpredictable things happen—birds and planes fly through, dishes hit each other by chance to create an unrepeatable music. The spirit of chance gets two blue stages on which to dance.

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