| Good morning, and welcome to 2025. If you spent last night counting down to the New Year, it may be a while before you’re once again so attuned to the passage of minutes and seconds—unless you visit MOMA’s current presentation of “The Clock.” A twenty-four-hour film by the Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay, “The Clock” stitches together a century of movie clips showing timepieces at every minute of the day and night—a project that tells the time “as well as a Rolex,” The New Yorker’s Daniel Zalewski observed in his 2012 Profile of its creator. Snippets of film feature an alarmed Julia Roberts realizing, in bed with Clive Owen, that it’s already twelve-fifteen; two appearances by Catherine Deneuve, first youthful and then middle-aged, in separate movies shot decades apart; and a vast assortment of other performers and moments, some famous, some not. Together they reflect a wide expanse of culture and human activity, as well as the biorhythms of night and day. A work so focussed on the passing of time inevitably becomes a memento mori, but that function also underlines the possibilities of living. In Ben Lerner’s novel “10:04,” the narrator observes that “The Clock” illustrates “how many different days could be built out of a day”—the endless permutations contained within each twenty-four-hour cycle. It’s an encouraging reminder as we enter another day, and year. Each minute brings a fresh cut, the character seems to say: a new vision, a clean start. | 
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