Art for No One

It’s not the kind of city where people live. That’s the first thing you should know. It’s not abandoned, that’s not how I’d describe it, and it’s certainly well-maintained. It just isn’t that type of city. The second thing you should know is it’s not the kind of PLACE people live either. It’s not impossible to live in the desert. But drive in a straight line away from the city for a while and you’ll hit the Nevada Test Site, which over the course of 40 years detonated over a thousand nuclear weapons. Drive in a straight line another direction

and you’ll find the unincorporated town of “Alamo,” home to maybe a thousand people. Drive in a third direction and you’ll hit the literal Area 51. All three of these places are more hospitable than the city built in the middle of the desert. The third thing you should know is that I can’t show it to you. City– and that’s the name, not the city or a city, just “City”– was not built to intersect with major trade routes, to extract valuable natural resources, or because of its bountiful farmland. City has none of these things. City is not

a city as we define them at all– it’s a sculpture by the “land artist” Michael Heizer, quite possibly the largest sculpture ever built. It took Heizer and his team fifty years to build, more than half his life. It is a massive project in scope and ambition. And yet despite its size, City is prohibitively hard to take in. Here are the laws that dictate its experience: The first law is luck. City is open three days a week between the months of May and November; that’s a total of about 78 days per year. On each of those

78 days, a maximum of six people are allowed inside. The Louvre admits a maximum of 30,000 people per day. City admits 468 people per year, and those people are largely determined via a single lottery drawing in January. The second law is dependency. You cannot get yourself to City, you must be driven. Both because the place is gated and because it’s off a series of unmarked winding roads in the middle of the desert. On site, there is no running water, no food, and no cell service. You must put yourself in the hands of the people who

brought you there. The third law is memory. You cannot take a picture at City. You cannot capture a pose in front of its enormous concrete emplacements, nor record yourself walking down its thousand-foot slopes. You can take notes, make drawings, attempt to put it into words– but you can’t document it in the most obvious, most technologically modern way. That’s why I can’t show it to you. Here’s what I can tell you about City, in raw facts. It is a mile and a half long, and half a mile wide– as multiple writers have pointed out, it’s approximately

the size of the national mall in DC. It sits somewhere within the thousand square miles of the Basin and Range National Monument, an area journalist Henry Brean described as “the emptiest space in a state famous for its emptiness.” It is made out of concrete and dirt and rock, intentionally built from materials that can be harvested from the nearby desert and hold almost no value outside of the shape they’ve been sculpted into. City might be over 50 years old or maybe it’s barely been born, depending on how you measure age. Heizer first broke ground on the

project in 1972. A half century later, in 2022, he begrudgingly opened it. Here’s what I can tell you about City, in raw feeling. I expected it to stand out more. City’s largest metropolitan neighbor is Las Vegas. Vegas is a place that so explosively differentiates itself from its environment that it has more in common with the nuclear bombs once detonated nearby than with the desert it's built in. The approach to Vegas is near-blinding: the sun glaring back off dozens of towering glass hotels, the artificial skies blanketing the streets, a sphere blasting 500,000 square feet of LED

technology at the hundreds of airplanes arriving every day. Square miles of carpeted, air-conditioned casino floors, mass-appeal performances, margarita slushies three feet long. Each feature of Vegas simultaneously reinforces and covers up the absurdity of its existence, the hubris to build a Shangri-La of hedonism in a landscape that provides for none of it. It’s this conception of a city that was foremost in my mind when I approached Heizer’s 50-year project. Something built up, built apart. But instead, City sinks into its surroundings– literally, I mean. The many sides of City slope down and in, so that its miles

of stone sit in a sort of crater. It sits so low and its immediate surroundings are so flat that it is largely invisible until you’re on top of it. City, from a distance, does not distort its environment in the way Vegas does. It’s a modest start for an artwork capable of swallowing you whole. What did stand out from the desert were my expectations. A half century of work, for this. I had already read about the physical toll on the artist. “My rib cage is blown out, my feet don’t work. Every bone in me is torqued

and twisted,” Heizer said in a New Yorker interview. He’s had polyneuropathy, a “simultaneous malfunction of peripheral nerves in the body,” very possibly from his continuous exposure to the construction materials. The money from his public works, like the “Levitated Mass” sculptures in LA and New York, has been funneled back into this. What is it going to feel like, I kept thinking as I drove out of Vegas and into the desert. Will I get what I’m supposed to get out of it? Will it be worth it? City is laid out in a long oval, a mile and

a half long concrete depression scooped out of the sand and rock. Inside it are a maze of whirling pathways and inclines that gradually move you towards either pole of the project. The pathways themselves are lined with gravel, but not just any gravel; each is a stone from the immediate surrounding area, a glacier-crushed memory from the Earth’s last ice age. The paths are lined with concrete curbs, but not just any curbs; occasionally, one will be left cut open to reveal the speckled cross section of the stones and metal within. These reveals make the curbs feel less

like the demarcations of a road and more like a felled tree, or a leg abandoned on a dissecting table. The bone-like rebar is undisguised in the center. They snake through City in places both accessible and not, implying that the walkable paths are merely side-effects of the project’s design. The goal of the design is never explained. The walls of City are made of concrete, but not just any concrete. The sides of the manmade crater are held by a pour so rough and textured it almost looks fungal. The walls seem porous, like they might breathe or at

least let out the breath of the earth behind them. From a distance, they are almost unidentifiable as concrete at all. It is an alien surface, one my eye struggled to categorize. At each pole of City sit its most identifiably sculptural elements. That’s where the angles of City live. Its gently curving paths and hills suddenly crash into flawlessly flat planes and geometrically perfect shapes, each crafted so exactly that their points seem to disappear into mathematical exactitude. Somehow, this is the part of City that made me most emotional– these shapes, like math, communicated a sense of…truth, beyond

what humans can conceptualize. In the middle of the desert, inside a silence punctured only by the wind, these concrete prisms towered over me with a significance I can never approach. In the hours I spent there, the setting sun pushed longer and longer shadows from each shape, painting the ground with the same truth I found in each angle. It is impossible to spend so much time in such a grand artistic gesture without starting to think about “us,” Humanity, our place in the universe. Although City is in the desert, it’s actually boxed in by mountains on all

four sides, mountains that the concrete peaks and valleys of City seem to softly emulate. It, unlike Vegas, does not seek to exist outside its environment; it is in conversation with its surroundings, a response to their call. But when considering the scale of the response and the scale of the call, City suddenly becomes about something else– God. Or, at least, the smallness of us in context of our surroundings. City’s vast scale would dwarf any museum or stadium that attempted to contain it. It is over half a lifespan devoted to making the grandest gesture possible and then

you look out at the earth just a few miles away and everything we’ve made feels like it rounds down to nothing. The legendary Spanish artist Francisco Goya once wrote: “Nature confounds and amazes those who know most! What statue or cast of it might there be that is not copied from divine nature? As excellent as the artist may be who copied it, can he not but proclaim that when placed at its side, one is the work of God, and the other of our own miserable hands?” Goya is saying that the task of an artist is to

attempt to replicate that which is unreplicable, to strive for a goal that can only be truly achieved by God. This, as much as anything, is what City feels like. It exists as an encounter with a beautiful, terrifying, sublime. If City is an artistic masterpiece is, to me, a question barely worth asking. I have never seen anything like it, I have never felt anything like the way I felt while I was there. But is its masterpiece status enough to make up for the other major questions of its existence? The differences between Vegas and City, as I

defined them earlier, are obvious. But is City not, also, a monumental act of hubris? A concrete scar, a 50-year construction project, a permanent imposition on the glory of nature, and one that fewer than 500 people a year are allowed to see? And this 500, I should mention, is a compromise. City has to admit visitors because it exists on a federally designated national monument– there is no telling what the policy would be if Heizer himself, the notoriously cantankerous artist, was in charge of it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Heizer would never have let

the public in. What would City be then, with its half-century timeline and 40 million dollar budget? If a city rises in the desert and no one is there to capture it, what does it matter if it’s a masterpiece? It’s hard to know what superlatives to attach to City. Wikipedia calls it the “largest contemporary artwork ever built” in its first paragraph, which, by some definitions, might be true. You could, if feeling cynical, instead call it the most pointless contemporary use of a hundred thousand tons of concrete. You could say it's the most visitor-hostile piece of artwork

located on public land, or the longest-ever gestation period for a skate park you’re not allowed to skate in. In many ways, City begs for these kinds of debates; it is undeniably literal, a flawlessly honed crater carved out of the desert. As Calvin Tomkins wrote in 1972, Heizer’s art is not conceptual– when you move hundreds of thousands of tons of dirt, he said, things cease to be “just a concept.” But at the same time, I think whatever superlative you attach to City is going to be inextricably linked to your attitudes about art as a whole– its

utility, its purpose, what we owe it and what it owes us. It is a mile and a half of the desert made perfectly…something. The “something” is what City won’t answer. Heizer’s stated inspirations are the great pre-Columbian structures of Central and South America; Teotihuacan [teh-oh-tee-wa-kan] and Chichen Itza in what is present-day Mexico, the Incan cities that stretched across what is now Peru. These connections are not without irony– in a scathing Grist article, Tristan Ahtone points out that City is able to exist due to the bloody seizure of lands from its original indigenous residents, the long tail

of the genocidal doctrine of Manifest Destiny. It isn’t hard to connect the colonialism that formed the United States to the violence that decimated many of the places Heizer cites as inspirations. But even setting that unignorable aspect of history aside, the connections to those cities and ritual sites strike me as strange because all of those places were used! They were inhabited, central gathering points in their respective locales. They were not, as City sometimes feels, created to become ruins. Instead, the closest land art parallel to City I can think of is the Nazca lines, created millenia ago

by people living in what would become southern Peru. The “lines” are enormous drawings that use the desert as a canvas. A monkey 350 feet tall, a spider 45 meters long. The lines are remarkable for a number of reasons. They are incredibly precise, with perfect parallels and smooth curves across their entire length. Like City, they are built not up but down, sculpted by removing the surface level of rock to reveal the lighter clay underneath. This medium of creation makes their preservation over 2000 years even more impressive; their fragile construction has survived because the desert exists in

a “rain shadow” that results in almost no precipitation. It is dry and windy, and so the Nazca lines remain clear– with the caveat that changes in the global climate are upending this natural preservation. And then there’s the question of their purpose. We…don’t know it. Popular theories, both of the historical and conspiratorial variety, suggest their utility. Markers of roads and trails, astronomical calendars, landing sites for aliens. The assumption is that they must be for something, serve some greater societal purpose. What else could they be? The most striking aspect of the lines is that from the ground,

they don’t really look like anything. The sculpting of the earth is so minimal, the designs so large, that to see the whole of a piece– the entire monkey, all the legs of the spider– you have to view them from the air. This, despite the fact that “seeing things from the air” was a concept that wouldn’t be possible for nearly two thousand years. So they must be for sewing, or irrigation, or communication, or record-keeping, or UFOs, right? Because why else would they put forth the effort to create something without providing a method to appreciate it? Why

would they go to such extreme lengths, to create art for no one? If it must be said, City does not offer visitors a chance to appreciate it from the air. Maybe, when Heizer references the great former cities of Mesoamerica, what he’s actually identifying is the sense of absence– the fact that at one time those structures were inhabited or used, and now they are not. I would be lying if I said City didn’t feel haunted. To Ahtone’s point, it exists on land with a violent, tragic history. But it also feels haunted by its own name, its

self-designation. To name a project so empty “City” is to highlight its barrenness, to question what a city becomes when removed from the people that give it meaning. The eeriest moment of my visit was in the only “sheltered” part of the sculpture’s vast expanse: a massive rectangle, pitched diagonally, leaned against a sheer wall. I walked under the obelisk, the air suddenly cold, the wind in a concentrated howl. There, on the perfectly flat floor, was the poop of some animal. I felt suddenly untethered, the illusion broken. The evidence that something, some other living thing, had once been

there, was almost frightening. City wasn’t just empty anymore. It was, somehow, deserted. Capturing emptiness requires evidence to the contrary. Years ago, I talked about the photographer Aristotle Roufanis. He creates enormous composited captures of cityscapes with all but a few lights turned off– their presence indicating the much greater absence. I had this same feeling with the traces of animal life in Heizer’s great concrete hollow. And last year, another photographer– Elena Helfrecht– made another piece of art to document emptiness. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Plexus is a beautiful book. The cover is dark and embossed,

its ridges and bumps reminiscent of smooth rocks on a riverbed, or the jostling of blood cells. A snake hides behind the pattern, only slightly more visible on the back cover– which, most of us English-speakers would initially assume is the front. The book is printed in reverse. Inside the book, Helfrecht’s photography charts a sort of wave of emptiness and memory. A flash of nostalgic history greets you after the title page- a family photo divided in two, an assemblage of people (and ducks) standing in front of a large, snow-covered building. But then, almost immediately, the book steals

that away. The next many pages are full of a surreal, documented emptiness: a snakeskin dangles across a missing floorboard. A birdhouse either hangs from a wall or lays on the floor, sinewy vines reaching for it. The dark is so present in every photo that it feels like the natural state of the world; no tree, basement, or attic exists outside of it. The objects are vividly decontextualized– they seem to exist in a dreamlike state, mundane but somehow altered, nostalgic but…wrong. Helfrecht calls it “a photographic case study based on still lifes that emerge from inherited trauma and

postmemory.” As the book goes on, images briefly become more recognizable, only to lose their grip completely and spiral into alienation, jamais vu, the familiar made new and uncomfortable. The stones of a mantle disappear into a starry night sky. A horse hide loosely drapes over a void. Chairs seem to dangle in…what, the hull of a ship? The spire of a church? The instant recognizability of fragments of the image dissolve into a contextless whole. Like City and its abandoned inspirations, the photos in Plexus feel haunted. However, the artistic “project,” as I’ve described it thus far, might not

carry that same air. It’s a book of photography, one available for purchase, perhaps under-the-radar but hardly hidden or inaccessible. There’s another element to Plexus, though. The top layer of the book contains the photos, the dark, the eerie nostalgia. But “Plexus,” the word, refers to a network of nerves, webbed, intricate. And nerves don’t exist on the surface. When you first open Plexus, you might notice a manufacturing defect– the first two pages are stuck together at the top, “unopened” in publishing terminology. They’re actually a single piece of paper that just wasn’t divided during the printing process. You

can push down on the pages and open a little corridor between them, a space in the middle of the images. But then, the next page has this defect too. And the one after that, and the page in the middle, and the ones at the end. A full half of Plexus is trapped inside these sealed pages, not a defect but an intentional withholding, a book haunted by its own confined contents. Then, the question: what do you do with this knowledge? I purchased the book, I own this copy. I am “within my rights” to do anything to

it– cut it open, put it through a shredder, light it on fire. But something gives me pause about slicing through Plexus, and it’s not just my library-informed book-gentle instincts. For as alien as its images seem, the book is undeniably intimate, personal– what I assume are real family photos, an artist statement wrapped in inherited trauma and generational trends of mental health. It’s hard for me not to view any cutting of its paper as violent, opening old wounds, revealing repressed memories. I once spoke about Barnett Newman’s painting, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?,” a massive piece

of art irreparably damaged by a man who took a box cutter to its canvas. To be suddenly placed in the position of the man with the knife, even on a much more individual scale, isn’t comfortable. What if the art of this book is in the concealment? Is there a flash of the entitlement of Newman’s vandal in the decision to carve up this book? That I am “owed” by the art, that it needs to bend to my expectations? Who is Plexus for, really? [cut to: cutting of book] The first hidden page of Plexus is blank. Many

in the center are too. But just enough are filled that you will check every time, the same way you will always cautiously eye a patch of grass you once saw a snake in. Some of the secrets are large, like this jet black centerfold with a pinwheeled rat king splayed along the sides. Some are small. A photo of an empty kitchen conceals this much more humble one of the same kitchen in use. But the most memorable discovery are words, the only words in the book outside of its title page. Cut through the paper flesh and it

will fall open to reveal “The House Surgeon,” a short story written by Camilla Grudova that is printed between the pages of this book and nowhere else. “The House Surgeon” is about a surgeon whose wife thinks there’s something living under their floorboards. She’s right. The man gathers both his medical and carpentry tools and lifts up one of the floorboards of their spare bedroom. Under the surface of their house, the man finds a living tumor, sticky and covered in hair. He excises the growth, but wonders about the surgery’s impact on the rest of the house– what if

its removal causes the floor to fall through? Instead, the tumors proliferate. He finds more in the oven, the linen closet, the hay in the yard. The surgeon decides that there must be a “mother growth,” a spring the other tumors flow from. But no matter how much of their house he deconstructs, he can only find its children. It doesn’t seem that he ever considers the alternative; that one day, he will have to cut into himself. … My copy of Plexus feels strange now, off. The page edges are tattered, my attempts at separating them never perfectly straight.

I find it harder to remember what was originally shown on the outside, and what was hidden below the surface. The entire book is consumed by the haunting captured in its photographs, a forgotten past disappearing into the dark. Years from now, if I return to Plexus, I will find it violently decontextualized from the statement it once made. Fifty years after Francisco Goya died, people ripped apart the walls of his house. It is because of this that we have one of the most iconic paintings in the history of Western art. Some works of art are “discovered” after

their creator’s deaths in a metaphorical sense– the art world wasn’t ready to appreciate them during their lifetime, only after death was their genius perceived. This is not the case for Francisco Goya. He was a working artist for almost his entire adult life, about as successful as one could hope to be. He painted for kings, did commissioned murals on the walls of churches, made etchings that were sold to the public. No, Goya’s last great collection was discovered more literally– no one knew that he painted his “Pinturas Negras,” his black paintings, across the interior walls of his

house. Goya never publicly displayed or even mentioned the paintings. He did not paint copies of them elsewhere. When he died, only a handful of years after creating them, the paintings went unmentioned in his will. They sat, decaying, inside that house for a half-century, until someone bought the property and stripped the walls bare, asking an art conservator to perform the harrowing task of reattaching each painting to canvas. Pathologizing the Pinturas Negras is almost irresistible. The nightmare visage of Saturn Devouring his Son. Two men attacking each other with cudgels, oblivious to the fact that they’re being swallowed

by the landscape. Judith, just before or after decapitating Holofernes. A miserable pilgrimage to San Isidro, the photo negative of the same pilgrimage he depicted 30 years prior. Countless art critics have asked “What dark visions must have ravaged Goya’s mind as he lived here, deaf, depressed, witness to a lifetime of war and brutality?” “What vision of god did he hold at the end of his life, to create these with his own miserable hands?” And I understand it, I do. But a more comprehensive look at Goya’s oeuvre reveals a lifetime of interrogation of the bleak and bizarre.

His early etching study, “the garrotted man” for instance, an uncommissioned work so detailed it almost certainly comes from firsthand observation. Or “Witches in the Air,” posed in front of a void as black as any of Helfrecht’s photos, where floating men devour a screaming victim. Or “Fire at Night,” in which huddled masses seem to be tormented by a divine light. Many of his pieces were gruesome depictions of war or societal critiques– his etching entitled “Great feat! With dead men!” features dismembered figures bound to a tree, no romanticism in their death or wartime contributions. In the grotesque

“Blow” (or “it’s blowing,” depending on translation), a– I mean, uhh…a contemporaneous caption to this one says “young boys are the object of a thousand obscenities on the part of old, dissipated men.” And these were not private, they were etchings, meant to be re-inked dozens or hundreds of times, designed to be broadly distributed. Goya was not one to shy from painting horrors, or hide his most twisted work from the public. I don’t think it works to frame the Pinturas Negras, dark as they are, in terms of mental dissolution or emotional collapse. But why, the question lingers,

why then keep them so private? Why trap them in the house, why attach them permanently to the interior? Much earlier in his career, as a young man, Goya was commissioned to paint a narrative of the Virgin Mary on the walls of a Carthusian monastery. He, for unknown reasons, didn’t use fresco for the murals, which would have slowed their aging and damage. Instead, he painted with oils directly onto the plaster walls, poorly sealed walls that would dampen and dry with the weather. By the middle of Goya’s life, the murals were already irreversibly damaged– by the time

he started on the Pinturas Negras, several of them would be unsalvageable. And yet, once again he decided to paint oils directly on top of the wall. Did he really make the same “mistake” twice? Or were these meant to live and die, have a lifespan of their own? That is, if he was painting directly on the walls, rather than…on something else. Recent X-rays of the canvases have revealed previous painted works below the horrors– some with distinctively lighter tones. A bucolic landscape under San Isidro, remnants of a dancing figure under Saturn. Because we know so little about

this period of Goya’s life, we don’t know if he painted and then repainted the walls, or if some of these artworks were already present before he moved in. To that end, some evidence suggests that the entire second floor of the house was added after Goya’s death– meaning that any of the paintings there couldn’t have been painted by him (though this theory is largely dismissed by the wider art community). Most destabilizing of all in our understanding of these paintings might be their titles; “Saturn Devouring his Son” morphs the piece into something specific, mythic, but that title

doesn’t come from Goya himself. He never referenced the paintings, remember? Never gave the public anything to understand them by, and certainly never named them. Everything we refer to them as– Saturn Devouring, Witches Sabbath, A Pilgrimage to San Isidro– is an attempt to categorize and contextualize, but we don’t know. We don’t know if this is truly Saturn, Cronos, who mythically devoured his children as infants, not adults. Much of what we see when we look at these paintings has to be filtered through 200 years of uncertain history, including decay, third-party restoration, and efforts to narrativize. Historian Robert

Hughes suggests that early, pre-restoration photos of Saturn show that the giant once had an erect penis– a penis that was covered up to prevent public scandal (you know, because everything else going on here is so normal). It’s scary, I think. Not just the darkness of these photos, but the opacity with which they were made, that we have so little to go on for such a titanic artist’s most famous work. When I look at Saturn, I think of another of Goya’s most striking pieces: The Colossus, a wartime landscape with another giant looming beyond the field of

battle. And further works, another giant (or the same giant?), slumped, looking back at us with some mix of exhaustion and shame. He has another, a sketch, the giant sleeping, his rough hair like a crown of thorns. I want to understand Goya through his colossi, much as others have tried to do through the political upheavals of Spain, or his individual family tragedies. It makes my view of him more consistent, more stable. But maybe it’s just new paint I’m layering on top of a story that he intended to naturally deteriorate. Francisco Goya died on April 16, 1827

in Bordeaux, France. He was buried there. 70 years later, Spain requested that France return the remains of one of their great painters. In 1929, he was re-buried in Madrid, under the floorboards of a church he painted during his life. But something happened between his death and reinterment: his skull disappeared from his body. There are many theories about what happened to the head, the crown, the mind of the legendary artist. It has never been found. Y’all know about Prince? Like, Purple Rain Prince? The Artist Formerly Known As? This [symbol] guy? I have little to say about

Prince’s art that hasn’t already been said by music writers far smarter than me. But what I do want to talk about…is the bank vault in his basement. Prince was famously protective of his music, its rights, and its usage. He pursued legal action against YouTube and eBay for unlicensed hosting of his music, he constantly battled with his labels over control of his masters, he told Weird Al to not parody his songs. In fact, his name change, his becoming The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, was an attempt to escape his contract and regain control over his own

release schedule. But Prince’s protection was not just legal, it was physical. When he unexpectedly died in 2016, one of the big question marks of his legacy was the basement in his Minneapolis mansion, which held an enormous, state-of-the-art locked box, far closer in size and complexity to a treasury than an average household safe. No one except Prince had the combination. And then he died. There’s an excellent episode of This American Life that details what happened afterward, and it’s told by one of the best possible narrators: the safecracker who was hired to break into the vault. It’s

a thrilling story. Cracking something like this is hard. Double, triple-layered security measures, noiseless tumblers, a six thousand pound door. And this one had an extra level of protection, a mousetrap-esque device that, if it detected someone was breaking into the vault, would slam down and prevent anyone from opening it, even if they had the combination. It was an extremely high stakes job. And yet Dave, the cracker, cracked it. He carefully drills through the door, opens it up, and finds…literal thousands upon thousands of recordings, dozens of finished music videos, more Prince art than you could possibly have

hoped for. As Esquire put it, “Prince fans will have enough new music to last them until the next millennium.” Which is amazing! Except, like. Look, Prince did not expect to die when he did. And apparently, he told one of his collaborators “all these recordings in the vault…would see the light of day after I’m gone.” But his former manager reported that Prince said in the 90s that he was going to “burn everything in there.” And in 2012, Prince said he was going to release "every good thing in the vault" in the next year, and then he

didn’t. And it was only after his death that Universal Music Group bought the rights to the unreleased stuff in the vault with plans to, you know, release it! Universal is working with conservators and estate planners, including Prince’s sister and other people close to him. From the outside, it does not feel overtly exploitative of his legacy. But for an artist who fought so hard during his career to keep control over everything he made, this feels…weird, right? To crack into that legacy with a diamond-tipped drill and sell it for decades to come? But what’s the alternative? To

let the tapes languish in a vault until they turn to dust? Conservators have made the same decision with Prince as with Goya; the world should get to experience this art, whether or not that was the intention. Whether or not that diminishes the point of the art itself. Michael Heizer has joked about this with City. He is, in many ways, extraordinarily lucky. The site of his massive sculpture has been turned into a national monument, which will prevent further development and maintain City’s isolation. The project has received a massive endowment, which helped with finally completing the fifty-year

construction and funds the continuous required upkeep. But these are also more hands on the steering wheel, a compromise for the uncompromising artist, an uncertainty that comes after the certainty of death. “I’m a fool, alone, helplessly watching as they wait for me to die,” he said. “So they can turn my ranch into a gift shop and motel.” Goya’s paintings were not allowed to decay, Prince’s vault couldn’t stay closed, Helfrecht’s book sits in tatters on my shelf. The only Art for No One that I’m able to talk about is art that’s failed in its pursuit of solitude.

It’s the catch-22 of the topic: there are canvases locked in basements, recordings on old tapes, things that were meant for no one and will succeed in being that. Because they succeed I will never know. This is the crux of the video game “The Beginner’s Guide,” released in 2015 by Everything Unlimited, limited. Spoilers, by the way. The game, a 90-minute “walking simulator,” was not just written by Stanley Parable developer Davey Wreden– it’s guided by him as well. [“Thank you very much for playing The Beginner's Guide. My name is Davey Wreden, I wrote The Stanley Parable, and

while that game tells a pretty absurd story, today I'm going to tell you about a series of events that happened between 2008 and 2011.”] Wreden is the only voice we hear in the game, but I don’t think we can call him the main character. That honor belongs to someone named Coda, a developer Wreden knew circa 2010. The playing experience of The Beginner’s Guide takes place over a number of discrete “games,” all created by Coda. Wreden plays the role of a curator, walking us through the different periods of Coda’s creative output, helping us understand the often

abstract levels, explaining Coda’s thought process for each one, and occasionally tweaking the games to aid in our experience. While not traditionally “thrilling” in the way some games are, playing through The Beginner’s Guide is enthralling the same way a smartly designed museum exhibit (or a well-paced video essay) can be. Any confusion is swiftly answered by Wreden, the line he draws from one of Coda’s games to the next is intelligible; you really feel like you can understand the evolution of this voiceless artist, his touchpoints and motifs. Wreden reveals striking things to us– one of the most memorable

moments of the early game is when we play a level that consists of a single corridor, and then Wreden “edits” the environment in real time so we can look beyond the walls and see dozens of similar corridors stretching into the distance, places we never would have seen if Wreden wasn’t there to show us. But our guide seems…impatient, too. In one of the very first of Coda’s games, Wreden says that some of the strange design decisions– such as a gun that can’t be reloaded– aren’t necessarily indicators of an incomplete game. He says “we should talk about

his games for what they are, rather than what they’re not.” And then not two minutes later, you reach a section of the level that contains a labyrinth, and this happens: [“Apparently this space station has a labyrinth on it. I...eghhh...sure, I don't know. There's really no reason for it that I've been able to discern, so in the interest of time, I'm just going to skip you on past it…Okay. This is the part that's interesting.] He’ll do this again, for a stairway that gets increasingly slow to climb, or a jail cell that asks you to spend a

full hour inside it. In the interest of time, in the interest of pacing, Wreden sands off some of the rougher edges of Coda’s work. But we forgive him, because those sections of the games did seem annoying, and they’re secondary to the point Wreden is trying to reveal to us about Coda. I mean, Prince’s vault had thousands of recordings in it– we’re reliant on curators to clean things up. And what Wreden is guiding us towards, this all-encompassing understanding of not only the games but Coda’s emotional state while making them, encapsulated by the recurring light posts Coda

places in the games– I mean, it’s irresistible. We’ve got to know what it all means, why he was driven to make such bizarre art. That’s what Wreden promises he can tell us. Until he doesn’t. The “twist” of the Beginner’s Guide isn’t a death, or an explosion. It’s a twist of curatorial reliability. We hear directly from Coda exactly one time in The Beginner’s Guide, a letter written on the walls of the last game he sends Wreden. “Dear Davey, Thank you for your interest in my games. I need to ask you not to speak to me anymore.”

“I wonder at times whether you think I am making these games for you.” “Would you stop taking my games and showing them to people against my wishes? Giving them something that is not yours to give?” The entire game, all our experiences thus far, are suddenly made rotten. Coda rejects Wreden’s understanding of his games. Coda rejects Wreden’s distribution of his games. Coda rejects Wreden’s modification of his games, the sanding off of their edges, the addition of the banal symbolism of the light posts. The Beginner’s Guide is a horror game for people like me. Because Wreden’s betrayal

of Coda’s art, of Coda, is so complete that he not only destroys his relationship with an artist he loves, but manages to deaden the art itself in his attempt to show it off. In trying to show us what he found special about it, he shatters that specialness. The Beginner’s Guide is a work of fiction. Davey Wreden the narrator is not Davey Wreden in real life, Coda is an invention of the narrative. But knowing that doesn’t rid me of the nauseating feeling of…complicity, I guess? For accepting Wreden’s analysis of Coda’s work so easily, consuming it so

passively. “If there was an answer, a meaning, would it make you any happier?” I need to tell you something about Michael Heizer’s City. There are, actually, pictures of it. They’re actually just right there, if you google it. The New York Times was allowed to bring in cameras, rigs, drones. They got images of it that…most of the world will never see with their own eyes. They got images of it that even I didn’t see– the whole structure from above, its massive obelisks under the night sky. I’m glad they exist, I guess. This is how I found

out about City– this makes the achievement visible for everyone who can’t win a lottery and drive out into the middle of the desert. And yet…I kind of hate them. There’s a reason I’m not using them here. Every photograph, every drone shot is a decision of how to frame City. What gets included or excluded in the New York Time’s drone photography of a masterpiece? What do they decide are the important parts? Do they capture the wind, the silence, the colossal mountains beyond the desert range? And do you get that from what I’ve said? I’ve tried to

communicate City to you as well, and not only have I failed in communicating my own experiences, I may have erased a fraction of its magic for the audience of this video. Are we all doing the same thing, complicit in erasing the concept for Art for No One? I expected, when beginning this script, that I wasn’t the first to come up with the phrase “Art for No One.” But I couldn’t have guessed just how targeted its pre-existing use would feel. Art for No One, or “KUNST FÜR KEINEN” was an exhibit at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt

Germany that displayed works from over a dozen different artists of all mediums, schools, and styles. Their commonality is that of history: from 1933 to 1945, each of these artists refused to affiliate with the Nazis but nonetheless remained actively producing art in Germany. Because the fascist government controlled both the showings and definitions of acceptable art, most non-complying artists who were able fled the country. To stay in Germany, continue to make art, and yet refuse to produce anything for the regime was to decide to make art for no one. The insight these artists provide on their situation

is arresting. Willi Baumeister journaled in 1941. “It's not easy to endure the depression of this time. And this for seven years already…I will likely never be able to show my pictures in exhibitions again. I thus work for myself alone.” But their situation, externally forced rather than internally chosen, underlines the difference between those artists repressed by the Reich and the ones I’ve spoken about today. Baumeister would have certainly made his art public if he was able, as would Lea and Hans Grundig or Hannah Höch. If possible, many released their art after the end of the war;

Lea Grundig compiled her howling faces and clouds of violence into a collection she called “the anti-fascist primer.” Even when their work was ambiguous though, the context of its creation was clear. And here lies the difference, between the Schirn’s definition and mine. Fascistic repression of an audience is despicable, sure. But artistic indifference to an audience is…maddening! Crazy-making! Because what Heizer, Helfrecht, Goya, Prince, Coda, the carvers of the Nazca lines have all done, intentionally or not, is forced us to take their art purely on its own terms. When they detach themselves from their works’ public understanding, they

paradoxically make it even more intimate, more personal– we are forced into silence, listening not to what the artist tells us but to the whispers of the art itself. In doing so, the art lays bare our insecurities. To admit to not understanding is to make oneself vulnerable. To obsess over someone’s private work is to reveal our near-compulsive artistic voyeurism. To view art made for no one is to grapple with our own need for connection. As Wreden begs in the final minutes of The Beginner’s Guide, “Please, help me. Please give me some of whatever it is that

makes you complete! I want whatever that wholeness is that you summoned out of nothing and put into your work. You were complete in some way that I never was.” Even that’s an assumption, rooted in nothing more than Coda’s opacity. But Goya suggested that all great art stems from divine nature, that the task of an artist is to try and inevitably fail to channel the sublimity that already exists. Why was any of that nature created? Not for external validation, I know that. Not for the purposes of being shown off. I cannot answer the ~ethical~ question of

viewing art for no one. Expectations of privacy ebb with the years; Coda’s exposure feels like a sharp knife, Prince’s an uneasy precedent, Goya no more than a historical curiosity. The root of the problem is that art can not be from no one– no matter how spectacular a piece is, it cannot overrule the kindness and consideration we owe to each other. Before I got to City, I worried about experiencing it properly, put pressure on my fallible self to “get it.” But when I was there, that gash of concrete in a cradle of desert and mountains, almost

dissociating into the endless space around me, it was an imperfection that brought me back. The evidence of animals previously sheltered below a massive artificial slab– their bodies gone but their dirt, dung, and hair left behind. We are those animals. Our presence may dilute the waters of artistic creation, but that dilution is simultaneously what helps us appreciate how clear the waters once were. Look into the water, lay yourself bare, find what the art says to you and you alone. Because who is “no one”? You can create art without intending or caring how another person will experience

it. You simply make it for the world instead, the sky and the earth, the trees and the stars, the plexus of inexpressible connections between everything and nothing. And sometimes the rest of us get the briefest glimpse of those connections. Sometimes, we get to see it too. Hey uhh, did you know I’ve got a book coming out? It feels almost anticlimactic to say that it’s simply a book you can open up and read and you don’t even have to cut anything or drive to the middle of the desert to see it. But for me? It is

still an incredibly important, and dare I say beautiful, piece of art. “How a Game Lives” is the name of the book. It’s an annotated anthology of my favorite essays I’ve written over this unlikely YouTube career– “Fear of Cold,” “Who’s Afraid of Modern Art,” “The Legacy of the Haunted House,” and many more. I’ve returned to each essay and written thousands of new words, additions, reflections, explanations, and more. It is, in a sense, the inverse of Art for No One… BUT there is room for both art that explains nothing and art that explains everything. I think the

book conveys the same sense of passion I try to put into every video I’ve made, and that’s as good a reason to make something as I need. Fortunately, I’m not the only one making art for it. There’s the stunning cover art by one of my favorite working artists, Kilian Eng. There are the staggeringly talented writers I’ve convinced to write afterwords for each essay– video essayist Noah Caldwell-Gervais, creator of “Citizen Sleeper” Gareth Damian Martin, author of “Chain-Gang All-Stars” and “Friday Black,” Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah. And if you get the deluxe edition, which is only for sale

in this pre-order period, you also get a 7-inch vinyl with the best songs written specifically for my essays– remember what a banger “The Cremation of Sam McGee” is? This is your one and probably only chance to own it physically. I’m more excited about this book than pretty much anything I’ve ever made. If you like my work, if I’ve ever made you think about things differently, if you want to have a reminder of the things I’ve made after this whole platform I’m speaking on inevitably goes kaput– I don’t think you’ll regret picking one up. You can

order one right now, with the link in the description.