We pray for good weather
One of the less-discussed things about me is that I am good at refreshing for tickets. I have a wireline fiber connection, I am fast at computers, I keep a clock open behind my browser, and I know general bandwidth hygiene: close all of the apps that ambiently hoover data, pause your other devices on the router level, etc etc etc.
Usually I’ll get something if the thing doesn’t sell out in two seconds. This skill has helped me a great deal in life. One time, a friend lamented that a major pop star’s tickets were in significant demand. I said “oh okay” and got them six, not-bad seats, at face. Another friend needed to refresh a bad website for an appointment to get Italian citizenship; it happened at my desk. You get the idea.
The peak of this, my unclimbable Everest, has been City, a contemporary artwork in Nevada that was completed rather recently, which I wrote some text about two & a half years ago. Because that artwork happens to be over a mile long and a half-mile wide, and because it happens to exist in the Nevada desert several hours’ drive from anywhere, and also because it happens to lack amenities, the way you view City is to be driven there in a van from central Las Vegas with five others, once a day, when the seasons cooperate. Tickets for the following year become available every January 02. No photographs are allowed. We pray for good weather.
This is all a long way of saying that I woke up one morning, told my partner about City, that I’d be refreshing for tickets that day. “Well that’s nice,” they said, fully expecting to live an existence where they didn’t have a sudden, non-transferable engagement in central Nevada that September. And then I did in fact get tickets to City, which remains so boggling to me that I have spent the past six weeks processing it. Nobody expects to get tickets to City; everybody expects to try. And the kind of people who spend their holiday break refreshing for City are a bit of a strange lot; I am the only person in my friend group who understands what any of this is, let alone the gravity of it. There are others like me, and some of them will be piled into a van in eight months. We pray for good weather.
There are famous artworks everywhere, and the whole point of their being famous is that they exist in institutions whose whole point is to show them to you. Go to any big-deal museum in the world, pay about twenty bucks, stare at a masterpiece. Visiting City costs five times any museum’s admission, it’s almost impossible to get tickets to, and you have to fly to a cursed hellhole on your way there. Because of its exclusivity, as well as the photography ban, City still feels like a secret that’s whispered to you. There were big articles when it came out, profiles of the artist, highly manicured photo shoots, and now those are all forgotten, replaced with a signup form that becomes active almost never. City the structure may outlast all of us; City the idea is fleeting. We pray for good weather.
Normally, just getting the tickets would be unworthy of text. But there is enough of a time gap between now and actually visiting the thing. And there are so many ideas swirling in me about what the thing must be, and what the experience of getting there is. Will the van be nice? Will people talk a lot? Reddit offers two anecdotes; unlike the lengthy, fawning profiles of the artist’s struggles, they actually focus on lived experience. Both say that City is intensely quiet. I felt this same notion a few weeks ago when hiking in Joshua Tree; there were no rustling leaves, just stillness, tinnitus, your own breath. What will it be like to experience something human-made with the same sound? We pray for good weather.