Tuesday: Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock . . .

The time you'd spend watching "Hamlet," uncut: Three hours 58 minutes.

Beethoven's Ninth, in a brisk performance: 66 minutes 15 seconds.

The time the average museum-goer spends looking at a work of art, as clocked one morning at the Hirshhorn: Well under 10 seconds.

On the second day of my week, I decided to see what it would feel like to push the experience of a single picture as far as it could go.

To add to the challenge -- the risks we critics run! -- I chose a spare abstract work: "Color Line," painted in Washington in 1961 by Morris Louis and on view in an all-Louis room on the third floor. It's a plain, unprimed vertical canvas, about seven feet tall, with nine soft-edged stripes -- midnight blue, orange-red, dull brown, orange-red again, forest green, yellow, more dark blue, dark olive, then yellow once again -- running from its very bottom almost to its top edge.

The picture kept me going for 2 hours 9 minutes. Here are some points pulled from a minute-by-minute record of this marathon. (The guards clearly thought I was casing the joint. The longer I stayed, the more often they checked up on me. )

* * *

10:37: There are flubs in the picture: Wrinkles in the canvas, smudges on its pristine background, even a tiny curl of hair caught in the paint. That seems okay, even good. It helps fight the myth of the "perfect" masterpiece. Fine works of art are prone to the same imperfections as other man-made things. They're great despite their flaws, not because they don't have any.

10:46: The painting's upside down! Or rather, Louis chose to hang it so that it would push against its "natural" orientation. Its stripes look as though they have been made by letting paint flow "down" the canvas -- as it hung in the studio -- until it stopped short of the far edge. But by hanging the finished painting so the dripped stripes now run "up" the canvas, it stops being an obvious record of the action of its making, and becomes a more purely abstract composition.

The paintings of Louis's most important predecessors, such as Jackson Pollock, were all about leaving a record of an artist's dramatic actions. This picture rejects such "narrative" content.

10: 51: It's pretty. It's remote and uninvolved in the outside world. You could even say that it reflects the "Brady Bunch" complacency of prosperous, postwar America. It would look good in a bourgeois dining room. So sue it.

10:57: As a composition, it's still surprisingly traditional. The stripe still reads as a figure on a background, about the height of a tall man. Its "foot" rests on the picture's bottom edge, with open "sky" around it and above its "head."

11:04: The plain canvas background that takes up so much of this picture is actually a pretty rare color in older works of art. You mostly find it in skin tones. White skin tones, that is. Louis was working in recently desegregated Washington: Could there be some sense that, unconsciously, his pictures stood on the Caucasian side of things? That they're part of an artistic tradition where pale, pinkish beige is a color of special note?

11:16: The midnight blue Louis used has a glistening surface, whereas his other paints are absolutely matte. It's that kind of subtle detail that makes the picture sing. You only really absorb what the picture's about, and how it works, if you give it time. The less there is in a picture, the more time it takes to "get" it properly.

11:34: Is this picture a kind of distillation of a single brush stroke? Does it represent, blow up and pull apart that basic artistic gesture -- the flick of color put down on a canvas ground?

12:08: The more you look at the picture, the harder it is to pin down precisely what visual experience you get from it. It generates so many weird afterimages and so much optical "buzz" that it's hard to say exactly what "there" there is, there.

12:46: A Hirshhorn docent brings a bunch of tourists to the Louis gallery -- one of the most important in the museum. She seems apologetic. She explains that it's the kind of work you don't talk about, because it has no "content." She says, "You either like it or you don't."

After two hours, I've still got things to say about this picture. If it weren't for an aching back, I'd stay awhile more. I guess I like it.