After 50 years, Michael Heizer is finally ready to unveil City, his life's work

That doesn’t mean you’ll like it there’s an excellent chance you won’t. But experiencing art in real life is fundamentally different than seeing images of it, and this is doubly true for larger scale or more installation oriented pieces.

A good example that’s a little closer to home and easier to experience for many is DIA Beacon outside of NYC.

Not gonna say the prestige around them (aka, the dollar valuations that contribute to the hype surrounding those works) didn't influence me. I'm sure it does on some level (but other hyped-up works of art don't really do it for me, like stuff that Koons & Damien Hirst make).

But seeing Rothko's paintings in a huge room, as a series, is very imposing, ominous, and for lack of better word, cool. Felt like a sensory immersion experience that taps into other parts of you that you didn't expect, not unlike looking at a vast beautiful landscape.

If you only see it as a jpeg/ png that's like, 4-6" on your monitor, or as a 8" x 11" print in a coffee table book, it'll pale in comparison. Even if the discrepancy sounds utterly obvious, the in-situ experience is so vastly different, that even if it doesn't hit you like it does for others (i.e., me), it's still worth it to go see it as is, just to see how you'll respond to it or not.

FTFY. ;)

Then again, I can get joy/awe/wonder/ennui/whatever from wandering around abandoned villages, ancient ruins (even the partly reconstructed ones), cemeteries, woods, wastelands, abandoned infrastructure, etc. Or even working places/venues, but at times of least activity. The key thing, for me, is that there must be few/no people around me - to let my mind unleash itself from the trivia and go roaming - that, for me, is when the 'art' (whatever 'art' is) happens.

I could get jealous of the financial support the artist has received over the years as he strives to make his vision solid. But I have a suspicion that he would probably built something even without support. It reminds me of Outsider Art in that way: people driven to create despite the barriers others put in their way. That such people exist gives me hope for the species.

I spent my 40th birthday wandering around Uxmal. No crowds; no tourists coached in on the hour. Just me and my partner and a collapsed civilisation surrounding us. Best birthday I've ever had! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uxmal

https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Hanson-...

They often have quite interesting shapes, too.

They made the valley it’s in a national monument to prevent the yuca mountain nuclear storage from being readable:

So:’ “City,” because it was now part of the national monument, would have to admit public visitors.’

Here is a “gifted article” link for those without a subscription:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/19/arts/design/m...

It’s like he designed it for humans, not despite them.

https://www.crawickmultiverse.co.uk/

https://www.pepsico.com/sculpture-gardens.

Dia Beacon is modern art in a old cracker factory that is huge and fun to explore. I have a love/hate relationship with modern art, but in the context of this giant building it was fun.

https://www.diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/dia-b...

What passes as “good art” these days is completely relegated to the art community and utterly unintelligible to regular people. Is there any wonder that people dismiss it as a waste of resources? It’s every bit as bad as NFTs, academic turf wars, and Twitter purity spirals [1]. It’s yet another warning sign of the impending decline of civilization, if Toynbee’s thesis is to be believed.

[1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...

Over 13,000 nuclear warheads exist today and nothing is more crazy than that.

Is it? 50 years for a bunch of cement? Is it a great reminder? I'm so confused by the positivist tilt on every piece of grey meh that exudes from the armpits of these supposed apex artistic cogitators. We are allowed to just say how rubbish it is, right? This artist has projected it into the world of public opinion. And while I respect his autonomous ambitions and sheer willpower, I don't believe this is an exemplar of achievement, and I struggle in good faith to see how such a perception is arrived at. FWIW I guess nobody here has skin in the game. I get to sit here like you and froth on the sidelines. I best get back to my own toils.

If you don't regularly buy paintings for 100k+, I don't think this is for us :)

Especially focusing over a period of decades.

That's an art in itself.

Looks almost like it was built by one person's idea who then did all the work except that which physically required a helping hand.

Some of these things fit into a shoebox, some of them don't.

Everyone here going off about how they don’t “get” this—well, neither do I. I just think it would be cool to experience. It’s ultimately as pointless as love or music.

I think the way it looks like some kind of landing bay on Mars speaks just as much to how our sci-fi stories were influenced by our urban architecture as it does the reverse.

When this spreads, ugly art won’t be edgy or cool anymore, and we’ll look back on this 150-year period like we look at 80’s hairstyles today (“what were they thinking!?”)

I disagree with this. Especially the "really easy to make" part. Is this easy from a technical perspective? Yeah I'd probably say so but I wouldn't think to make this or express an idea in this way. Critics of this art might say that's because I have better taste than the artist here but point is, even if something is "easy," execution is all that matters and I'm not confident most people who say it's easy could execute on it.

Figurative painting — pretty much the definition of glorifying humanity - has made a HUGE comeback over the past decade or so, to the point where we art nerds make jokes about it.

There is still a lot of “difficult” art out there, and plenty of IMO anti-humanist work, but the breadth of styles that are taken seriously is greater than it ever was in history.

You don’t have to like everything. There’s plenty out there you probably would like.

It's OK for different people to have different taste in art.

This is such a shallow statement. Was it difficult to hit the keys which make up your lines of code?

You're too much a reductionist to appreciate this.

In the next few years we are going to have this debate over and over again (AI-art). Does art need to be hard to make to be called art? If I create something really beautiful but it only took me a few seconds to make, is it still art? Would your appreciation of an art piece change if you knew the author didn't spend as much time as you thought on it, why? It's still the same piece.

If a future civilization discovers a lost painting, they can't tell how many hours went into it. Art should stand on its own, the difficulty in creating the final piece is a metadata that is biasing our judgement. "Beautiful" and "hard to create" are orthogonal dimensions.

I want to visit it, and I expect when I do I'll consider it one of the top aesthetic experiences of my lifetime.

That's a matter of taste, though, and taste obviously varies.

Of course, there is a lot of pretentiousness in the art world, but often when you see a painting or artist who is revered in some way, and you wonder "Wut? This is incredibly simple and boring." it's often because the artist was the first person to really look at the world in that way. Probably my favorite example of that is Agnes Martin, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Martin. I look at her work and think "She's famous for drawing graph paper??" but I think the Wikipedia article does a good job explaining how her work was such a departure from what came before. Similarly, Heizer is famous for the scale and site-specific nature of his works, where sculpture and landscape blend.

This may not be a perfect analogy, but PagerDuty has a market cap of about 2.25 billion dollars (and it was recently twice that). I've used PagerDuty extensively, and I've thought "The is basically a calendar system with alerting policies. How can this be worth so much money?" But the fact is that PagerDuty was one of the first applications of its type that solved an important (if mundane) business problem it a straightforward way. It may not be "genius" in the way Einstein is genius, but it was one of the first to address this problem it a way that users really liked.

I think Wordle is similar - it's not some genius accomplishment, but it does so many things in just the right way (the once-a-day nature, the way sharing works, the jiggling of the letters, the fact that most games just take a couple minutes but every now and then one will leave me stumped for a long time, etc.) is why it became a phenomenon when there have been "word jumble" games for ages.

So my point is that if you see some piece of art that you don't "get", at least first try to understand the context and history of what went into making a piece. Even if you still don't get it after that, it can leave you with some appreciation of why that particular work is more renowned than others.

... when artists had to compete with the perfection of camera and escaped in an orthogonal direction.

Are the pictures on that article broken for everyone else too or just me? I'm sort of curious about the art the author is ranting about.

How you feel about art is a reflection of you, not society. If you think this art is "bland and ugly and depressing" then maybe you should examine yourself as to why you feel that way. Plenty of people find concrete art interesting, attractive, and stimulating.

Oh really? In an ugly and cruel world where humans are terrible to each other, you demand a lie and to glorify the undeserving? Perhaps you think the point of art is to make you feel good? I think what you are looking for is entertainment, there is plenty of that.

You are partially right that what is celebrated as art reflects on (wealthy) society but it is also an expression of perception of reality by the artist which resnoates with those who appreciate it. Perhaps not everyone finds fake portrayals of beauty appealing but many find enjoyment in the beauty of truth as they see it in their reality?

Ever watched "The Shock Of The New"? Amazing BBC 8 part series from 1980 with art critic Robert Hughes. He gives a great history and interpretation of modern art.

Years later, before he died, he made a follow up piece where he interviewed an art collector, and it cemented my armchair theory that modern art's rejection of beauty and mastery unwittingly allowed charlatans and billionaires to subvert it, in much the same way that popular music has been hijacked by businessmen.

you could maybe do an offroad skateboard though

The first time I heard about was in a video "Monumentality" [1], which explores why humans throughout history have tried to make monuments; big things, skyscrapers, pyramids etc.

Michael Heizer will die one day, as will we all. But by its nature of being a huge complex made of rocks and dirt, 'City' will continue to stand for thousands of years probably.

[1]https://youtu.be/bwGKqiOyIAM&t=46m43s

These artists are both obsessed with shape, size and light. The art is partly environmental. It is exploring how the desert light (harsh bright white at noon, dark violet/orange at sunset) affects the simple shapes.

Bang on! I also hate the people who lecture on how to hold a wine glass.

Fine wine is just booze for rich people.

So much this. Don't go to Paris without visiting the Pompidou. Allocate a day because it's huge. But it's also uncrowded so you can wander peacefully and get up close to some amazing art.

I feel there are far more people complaining about wine snobbery than there are actual wine snobs

Have you been out to Nevada to see this work?

  dry red with your grilled salmon

Because the Mona Lisa is not just a piece of art, but a piece of history that had a wide ranging influence on art, and it was painted by one of the greatest artists who ever lived, who was also a polymath and excelled in engineering and science. There are also some unsolved mysteries around it. If all you see when looking at the Mona Lisa is flourishes of paint, then maybe you need to consider wider contexts.

Art is valuable because it engages humanity, emotionally, socially, intellectually, and there's no doubt that the Mona Lisa has created a lot of debate and study. Maybe you don't like it by itself, but you should still appreciate the wider context.

There's a whole class of landscape and still life paintings which have mundane subjects that express geometry in deep, layered technique. The clues in how it was constructed and are there if you look for them. The appreciation of which can change a painting you thought was 10% interesting on first glance into 110% interesting with a deeper insight.

I agree though, painting what you see is a great way to suceed now.

Admittingly, not all art forms will have this effect on everyone but a specific painting, or sculpture or a melody might suddenly give you a tiny glimpse of this. Perhaps it was the way the colors melded together, or the symmetry in the picture or an obnoxious pattern that garbed your imagination; this is why people travel thousands of miles across the world to visit galleries, touristic sights and music events.

Ever noticed how your wall looks completely dry and uninteresting until you hang a painting or a beautiful image on it? Try removing music, images, paintings and movies from your existence and see if you can bear it for more than a few seconds.

Without art, life is mundane because art is the outpouring of human imagination.

https://sfbayca.com/2021/01/21/__trashed-3/

Everyone agrees the new design will be unsafe for bicyclists, and slow down taxi service.

It's replacing a decade-old bus lane that was previously used as a poster child for overpriced SF construction projects. I can't find an article about the previous boondoggle bus lane, but remember it costing at least $10M's, but only covering one city block.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you consider the construction used primarily on-site materials, it appears the money largely went into laborer's hands. It's not like the region is teeming with employment opportunities for those folks, and they surely didn't just set fire to their compensation. My guess is it fed and housed a bunch of area families, not a total waste - but sure, the labor could have built something more useful.

Now the area is a national monument and will draw tourism, creating jobs and growing the economy in a desert.