1. Building a city for no one.

In 1972, Michael Heizer disappeared into the Nevada desert with a vision and a shovel. While the art world moved on, while careers rose and fell, while the internet arrived and Instagram turned every monument into a backdrop for selfies, Heizer kept on digging. "City" is the result, a mile-and-a-half-long land art sculpture. There are no maps, no gift shops, no designated photo spots. The nearest neighbor is Area 51. You can't understand it from photos or drone footage (though plenty will try). You have to trek it on foot, slowly, letting the site swallow you up and surrendering to what Heizer calls "the sculptural presence of silence."

Now, at 77 and in failing health, Heizer is finally opening his desert monument to the world. Sort of. Six tickets per day at $150 each. You'll be picked up in a nearby town, allowed to roam for a few hours, then driven back before dark because there are no lights and no cell service. Good luck getting a reservation. Instead of convenience and instant access, "City" demands the one thing we're least willing to give: our full, uninterrupted, uncomfortable attention. Heizer spent 50 years building something that refuses to meet us halfway - and maybe that's exactly the kind of art we need right now.

2. The fake Frank Lloyd Wright building.

The highest compliment the art department behind Apple TV's The Studio received wasn't from critics. It came from other Hollywood art department professionals asking, "Wait, did you actually film at a real Frank Lloyd Wright building?" For a show satirizing Hollywood's delusions of grandeur, production designer Julie Berghoff made the gloriously ambitious choice to create an original Wright building from scratch. Not inspired by Wright, not Wright-esque, but a building that could plausibly exist in his portfolio if Continental Studios had commissioned him in the 1920s.

But the thing about great forgeries is that sometimes they require more effort than the real thing. The team manufactured thousands of custom textile blocks with a C motif, threw welding slag at wet plaster to mimic the brass shimmer of Hollyhock House, and built massive walnut desks in six weeks because authenticity doesn't wait for furniture reissues. All of this meticulous craftsmanship exists purely to support a comedy about Hollywood taking itself too seriously. But that's exactly why it works. As art director Brian Grego explained, "You can get away with making fun of something if you prove that you know it really well."

3. A room for looking up.

There's a moment that happens in every James Turrell Skyspace - you walk into what looks like a minimalist room with a hole in the ceiling, sit down slightly skeptical, and then something shifts. The sky stops being background scenery and becomes the entire point. You realize you've somehow forgotten how to actually look at it. Turrell has built a cult following among artists, designers, and creatives precisely because he's managed to make contemplating light and sky feel less like mystical art-speak and more like rediscovering something obvious we've all been ignoring. His work has this quiet, almost infuriating power: it's technically just architecture framing the sky, and yet people leave his installations genuinely moved.

Now he's completing his largest and most ambitious Skyspace yet at Denmark's ARoS Aarhus Art Museum: a 40-meter-wide grass-covered dome called As Seen Below. Visitors enter through an underground corridor before emerging into a 16-meter-tall chamber where a central oculus frames the sky and Turrell's lighting system washes everything in shifting colors. "I'm shaping the experience of seeing rather than delivering an image," he explained. "The architecture holds the sky close, so you recognise that the act of looking is the work itself." In other words, he spent decades and millions building a dome whose entire purpose is getting you to appreciate something free and infinite that's been above you this whole time.