Watching “I Love Dick” is like attending an exhibition for which the artist has supplied her own curator’s notes. It’s an experience as much as a story: arresting, disorienting and provocative. It’s also very conscious of explaining to you how and why it arrests, disorients and provokes.

The form of “I Love Dick,” whose eight-episode first season arrives on Friday on Amazon, fits its subject. Adapted by Jill Soloway (“Transparent”) and the playwright Sarah Gubbins from a cult novel by Chris Kraus, it’s art TV about artists, a love triangle as Conceptual performance.

The first corner of that triangle is Dick Jarrett (Kevin Bacon), a famous abstract sculptor and rancher in Marfa, Tex. (The novel’s Dick was based on the media theory scholar Dick Hebdige; this one is inspired by the Marfa artist Donald Judd.)

As a sideline, Dick runs a residency fellowship program, where he collects artists and intellectuals like prickly cactuses. One makes video game art; another studies the aesthetics of pornography. Enter Sylvère (Griffin Dunne), Dick’s newest fellow and a Holocaust scholar, who arrives from Brooklyn with his wife, Chris (Kathryn Hahn), an experimental director whose latest work has just been dropped from the Venice Film Festival.