No photos, no objects: Tino Sehgal's art exists only when you're there

As an arts reporter, you learn to live with a certain inadequacy: Whatever words you lay down on the page will never equal the impact of encountering the work itself. In the end, every review bends toward the same conclusion — you, dear reader, simply have to go and see it for yourself. Still, you can attempt a translation. You can describe the atmosphere and the scale. You can single out details, place them in context and include photographs that give readers something tangible to hold onto. At the very least, you can offer an echo of the experience persuasive enough to make them step outside and walk into the museum. With Tino Sehgal, even that modest consolation falls away. There are no images to describe. No objects to analyze. No installation shots to accompany a paragraph. His craft emerges instead in the immaterial space between strangers, through voices and choreographies that materialize from thin air and dissolve just as quickly. So this may be the rare instance in which a review must confess its own futility from the start. For Sehgal’s art, there can be no descriptive surr