Spencer Finch’s show “Painting Air,’’ which opened this week at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, reveals a deep debt to the Claude Monet, the Impressionist beloved by the hoards, yawned at by the eye-rolling in-crowd. Finch made a copy of Monet’s “The Basin at Argenteuil’’ when he was a student at RISD in 1988 (it’s on show here a few feet from the real thing), and he has been thinking about Monet ever since.