The Best Piece of Art in 2020: the Utah Obelisk

In a year where we were all shut in our homes, when the art galleries and museums were all closed for months on end, the theme of 2020 was Not Seeing and Not Being Seen. No artwork succeeded in not being seen better than the Utah Monolith. (There may be better examples of Art That Has Not Been Seen this year, but then no one has seen them yet, so they can’t be written about.)

Sometime around 2016, an unknown genius (or geniuses) installed three gleaming metal sheets, 9.8 feet tall, into a triangle joined by rivets. It was brought to the absolute middle of nowhere — a desert in San Juan County, Utah, near the Bears Ears National Monument. There it stood, unnoticed and undisturbed, until biologists from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources spotted it from a helicopter while doing a count of bighorn sheep.

Here’s why it’s a masterpiece. It checks every box for the essence of 2020, but ultimately it’s “outside the box” in the most important way of all.

1. It played hide-and-seek with the audience. Stop a random person at the bus stop (assuming the busses are still running, and you are both wearing masks) and ask for the most important living artist. If the person happens not to be a PhD in Art History, my bet is that you’ll hear the name of the only one most people have even heard of: Banksy. If anyone has tapped into the current zeitgeist, it’s Bansky, and it’s partly because he has successfully fused high art with urban street art (i.e., graffiti). His work simultaneously goes for millions at auctions and is technically illegal. Best of all, it isn’t owned by elite private collectors and stashed away in mansions or museums. Odds are the person at the bus stop isn’t headed to a mansion or an art museum. You could find a Banksy anywhere (although it helps if you live in Bristol or London). The Utah Monolith could have been anywhere, and that’s exactly where it was found — at the junction of anywhere and nowhere.

2. Art reflects nature. If there’s one art truism that is, well, actually true, it’s “art reflects nature.” You can call it Mimesis, Realism, or just “being relevant,” but the idea goes back to Plato and beyond. Even when a work is purely abstract and non-representational (think Jackson Pollock on one end, or Yves Klein on the other), it’s saying something about how art either reflects (or is in itself) some fundamental aspect of aesthetic experience and/or human emotion. As William Shakespeare wrote, art “holds the mirror up to nature,” and is there a purer example of that than reflective metal plates weathering the sun, wind, and scarce rain in the middle of the Utah desert? It simply WAS, like the cliffs and sand surrounding it, ostentatiously man-made but presented with no explanatory placard or exhibition catalog. This was art made not for man, but for sheep. It saw the world move and twist around it for four years, undisturbed by any responsibility to answer to a human beings’ interpretations or priorities. It reflected (literally) nature (literally). It’s very literalness and physicality paradoxically invites interpretation and individual conceptualization, as the best art always seems to do.

3. Once we did find it, it reflected us as well. Art should make something happen more often than it usually does. From the moment it was discovered, the Utah Monolith triggered people to act exactly like who we really are, and it wasn’t always pretty sight. It reflected back a perfect portrait of American life in 2020. First, inevitably, came the social media: the shared videos on YouTube, the Twitter and Facebook posts, and the clickbait human interest stories in the online newspapers and magazines. It was an artwork made for Instragram. People usually have instinctive relationships with works of art — they know what they are supposed to do around them, and they know how they are supposed to be valued. It used to be that we all instinctively knew that a painting hanging on a wall in an art museum meant that you were supposed to stand at a safe distance from it in a quiet room, look at it with some intensity and thoughtfulness, ponder its place in art history and the context of the artist’s career and culture, and move along to the next one. But that time is gone. What great art seems to mean now is you’re supposed to stand in front of it and take a selfie. For example, what goes on in front of the “Mona Lisa” has gotten completely out of control. By instigating an absurd trek for hundreds of people to make their way into the remote Utah desert, driving their gas-guzzling vehicles on roads that are not roads, dropping their trash in the pristine desert, disrupting the wildlife, and leaving their fingerprints and “I was here” scratches on the reflective metal — all in order to take a selfie and post it on Instragram feeds — the Utah Monolith made us into a nasty piece of absurdist performance art. Then came the imitations as others wanted to either make a quick buck and/or jump on a viral trend: Wikipedia counts over 150 monoliths that appeared all over the world. The monolith became the new planking, the new Nae Nae, the new Whoa, the new Dab. Art reflects nature, indeed.

4. It absorbed conspiracy theories. The Age of Enlightenment, roughly the 17th and 18th centuries, produced a lot of very Enlightenment-style art. The so-called “Age of Reason” was (in theory, anyway) about science, certainty, proportion, order, and balance. Reason no longer answered to religion; religion answered to reason. Art was representational. There were lots of paintings of dignified people in chairs or on horses, and they were about chairs or horses with dignified people on them. There were paintings of bowls of fruit with a dead duck, and they were about fruit in bowls and ducks that are dead. The Age of Reason is over now, if you haven’t noticed. Reason now answers to Reddit and Parlor threads. There’s a non-zero chance that the person you talked to at the bus stop honestly believes that many prominent Democratic leaders have alien-implanted lizard DNA and are Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles. The Utah Monolith was a lightning rod (which it resembled, by the way) for daffy and archetypically 2020 conspiracy theories. It was dropped there by aliens (2001: A Space Odyssey is true!), it was a spy device, and there was most definitely a government coverup involved. It’s all very X-Files. Beautifully, it disappeared just as mysteriously as it appeared. Four people were spotted with a truck taking it away in the dead of night on November 28.

5. It’s anti-art. 2020 was a year that froze us in time. Culture either went fully pop (at best) or was coded as the elitist enemy (at worst). Commerce, education, recreation, and even family bonds were all either brought to a standstill or thrown into reverse gear. Hospitals became places of danger, doing nothing became an active contribution, politicians were charged with the destruction of their agencies, and the list of absurd but scorchingly real paradoxes goes on. The moment was ripe for a masterpiece of anti-art. There is a long and delightfully up-yours tradition of Surrealistic works like Marcel Duchamp’s installation of a urinal in an art gallery, Merit Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup, and Joseph Beuy’s crude child-like paintings. Anti-art is an established branch of aesthetics that goes well beyond Surrealism, however — it generally refers to works that question the definition and seriousness of art, often forcing us to consider where exactly art belongs in our lives. If we love that crayon drawing of a snowman from our three-year old, but you don’t particularly care for the bowl of fruit with a dead duck in the museum, which one is the “greater” work of art? Is it art only because someone smarter about such things says it’s art? Or because it’s expensive? Or because it’s made by a famous artist (Picasso’s scribbles, for example)? Does anti-art become anti-anti-art once it becomes a “masterpiece” and appears on tote bags and t-shirts in the museum gift shop? As the final exam question in my Philosophy of Art class with the great Paul Ziff said, “A painting is a work of art if and only if it has a blue dot in it. Discuss.”

The Utah Monolith is one of those “I could have done that”/”But you didn’t” works of art that often irritate us in art galleries. It took no particular skill at draftsmanship, design, or engineering to assemble. But it inspired us, moved us (including physically, to the middle of nowhere), challenged us, and made us laugh. There were no right or wrong answers to its many questions, because there was no identified artist or mediating curator to contextualize it for us. And perhaps best of all, the sheep and birds had it for four years, and we had it for only ten days. It’s gone, dissembled, currently in the possession not of Sotheby’s but the Utah Department of Land Management. You probably didn’t see it in person, and you probably never will. It was a work of imposing physicality, but it turned out to be a work of purely conceptual art for the rest of us that exists only in fleeting pixels or our imaginations. It accomplished more, and did it for a larger global audience, than any other work in 2020 did, and it all happened in under two weeks. The many imitations around the world completely miss the point. Like our own lives in the great scheme of things, we had it for only the blink of a dry and sun-dazzled eye in the desert.