The specter of Michael Fried’s imperious rhetoric looms large over Pamela Lee’s study Chronophobia: On Art and Time in the 1960s. Indeed, part 1 of her three-part study and (rather confusingly) the first of its five chapters both bear the title “Presentness Is Grace,” a quote taken from the last line of “Art and Objecthood,” Fried’s now seminal disavowal of “literalist” art, first published in Artforum in 1967. As many have done before her, Lee subjects Fried’s essay to an extended close reading, honing in on the discussion of temporality that motivates Fried’s comparison of Minimalist practice with that of the modernist painting or sculpture he favors. Fried argues that the most compelling works of art seem instantaneously present to the viewer: “It is as if one’s experience has no duration . . . because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest” (Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 145; emphasis in original). He prizes above all an art that occupies a “perpetual present,” that reveals itself in its entirety in one graceful flash. In contrast Minimalist work develops interactively over an extended period of...