How do you negotiate, or come to terms with, rapture? Shouldn’t rapture be felt, rather than contested, adjudicated, or philosophized? To inaugurate the Museum of Contemporary Art’s grand new building, curator Richard Francis has created “Negotiating Rapture,” an entrance into the realm of the exalted, the sublime, the transformative. Like the term “rapture” itself—much less familiar than the overworked concept of the sublime—nothing about this exhibition is easy or expected.

Eleven artists, belonging to several of the generations active during the postwar era, appear in the following order:

In what seems almost a Cook’s tour of the art of the ’60s and ’70s, Charles Wiesen deploys an arsenal of familiar strategies in order both to pay honor to Minimalist efforts and to lay bare the movement’s limitations. Like a treasonous heir, Wiesen turns the esthetic dictates of his predecessors in on themselves, an implosion that results in a curious affirmation of Minimalist practice. In View, 1996, five immaculately white objects hang across a gallery wall, casting discreet shadows and setting up quiet but intense pictorial interrelationships, its terse objecthood very reminiscent of Robert