Though the immersive metal sphere shrouded the viewer-in this case, Drake-in a 12-minute mixture of colorful lights and atonal sound, many of Turrell’s other works restrict their manipulation of perception solely to light, time and space. “I fuck with Turrell,” Drake later told Rolling Stone, directly citing the Light and Space Movement pioneer as inspiration while preparing to enter one of the artist’s Perceptual Cells at the same exhibit, where I also first encountered Turrell as a high school art student. Despite his decades-long visionary status in the fine art world, the artist’s sway over the cultural mainstream generally recedes into the background, sometimes literally, as in the case of Drake’s “Hotline Bling.” In the 2015 music video, moody shades of bright pink, blue-purples and Drakeposting yellow intermittently bathe the rapper and his backup dancers, not entirely unlike the Breathing Light room at the artist’s LACMA retrospective, which ran from 2013 to 2014. Quite likely, you’ve seen the direct impact of Turrell without even knowing it. Instead, the exhibits are designed to be savored over minutes and hours, the full impression of them only apparent to you only after a slow, gradual change in your own perception. Nor are the 78-year-old light artist’s works made for Instagram, or any social media platform offering up the attention span equivalent of hors d’oeuvres. The works of James Turrell were not made for TikTok.

The Dividing Sky by Jill Tew