What’s Happening: The award-winning artist teams up with experiential art venture Superblue and developer Niantic to launch an AR-based community network that lets users upload personal memories to physical locations. Billed as the world’s largest participatory art project, the endeavor also raises concerns about Niantic’s trove of user data.

The Download: When Pokémon Go burst onto the scene, in 2016, most of the 500 million users who downloaded the mobile app within its first year had yet to see anything like its forward-thinking use of augmented reality. The ultra-popular game, developed by Niantic with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, saw aspiring trainers hunt, capture, and raise the fictional creatures all over the world, creating an early example of what’s now known as the metaverse. Now, Niantic is bringing that winning formula to JR Reality, an AR-based community network launched by Superblue and artist JR that’s billed as the world’s largest participatory art project.

JR Reality’s premise is simple: Anyone who downloads Superblue’s mobile app can share their own firsthand experiences—a portrait, personal photograph, or voice message—of places around their city. Each image gets uploaded to a virtual map that other users can access and explore, making the app a collaborative virtual journal filled with personal stories rooted in physical places. Using AR and Niantic’s Lightship Visual Positioning System, which makes it so that AR experiences can be tethered to a physical location rather than floating haphazardly through a phone’s camera view, the community experiment invites users to go outside, explore their surroundings, and leave virtual messages on a living mural. The first phase kicks off in San Francisco, but will roll out to New York, London, Paris, Miami, and Los Angeles in the coming months.

JR Reality serves as an extension of the artist’s 2013 Inside Out Project, a platform that empowers communities to weigh in on pressing issues such as diversity, gender-based violence, climate change, and LGBTQ rights. Inspired by his own large-format street paintings, the project is available for anyone around the world to participate by wheatpasting large-scale portraits in public spaces. The results have been both compelling and controversial; per The New Yorker, “a participant in Iran, at grave personal risk, posted an image of a defiant-looking woman beneath a state-sponsored billboard” and “Russian gay rights activists protested with the images and were briefly imprisoned in Moscow.”

Niantic’s trove of spatial data gathered through Pokémon Go and soon JR Reality is raising red flags with privacy experts who’ve expressed concerns about what AR means for public surveillance. They worry that the vast amount of information may be vulnerable to hacks, meaning that some user movements could be tracked in real time. (Police search warrants, for example, have sourced footage from Amazon’s Alexa and Ring cameras.) Niantic CEO John Hanke, however, believes that AR will soon enter daily life in increasingly sophisticated ways—a key step toward “opening this science fiction reality we dream about,” he tells Time. “We can start putting virtual things into the world that are attached to the right parts of that physical world. Our big thesis is that the metaverse is something that happens out in the real world.”

In Their Own Words: “Have you ever passed somebody on the street and wondered what their story is? Or looked up through a window and wondered who lives there?” JR asks. “In my latest work, everyone is invited to leave portraits and voice messages attached to a special place. It’s time to go outside and explore, and reconnect with one another and show the world your face again. Together we can tell the world your story and meet the amazing people that live in your city.”

Surface Says: Few people are talking about how the metaverse can actually integrate with the physical world, which we anticipate will end up being the nascent technology’s most useful application.

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Chanel’s Staggering Earnings: The stock market has seen no shortage of turbulence in 2022, but you wouldn’t know it from the booming art and designer fashion markets. Case in point: Chanel, which reported a record revenue of $15.6 billion in 2021—a 23 percent surge from pre-pandemic numbers that has been largely driven by spending in the categories of clothing, watches, and fine jewelry.

Given its soaring revenue, the storied fashion house announced it will join the likes of Brunello Cucinelli in opening private stores accessible only to its highest spenders starting in 2023. While Chanel is clearly thriving after the initial shock to its bottom line at the onset of Covid-19, some of its loyal fans aren’t pleased by recent developments. In February, the brand sparked outcries from shoppers after raising prices three times during the pandemic.

Nourish the Hand That Feeds You: There’s a reason high spenders are labeled very important clients, or VICs. Although there are few of them, they make up a substantial percentage of business. The top three percent of Mytheresa spenders, for example, are responsible for 30 percent of its revenue. Similar to “whales” at luxury casinos, Mytheresa’s top-tier clients spend a minimum of $100,000 and up to “the high seven figures.” And brands are eager to encourage more of it.

Fashion houses and luxury retailers are allocating substantial budget to hosting and outfitting influential spenders at splashy outings: Givenchy recently flew some of its VICs to the Save Venice charity gala in New York, Alexander McQueen is treating its most valued customers to private fashion shows, and Gucci organized a luxurious trip to Coachella this year for its VICs.

The Kardashian Effect: While Dolce & Gabbana has adamantly stated that it “hosted”—not sponsored—Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker’s lavish wedding weekend in Italy, the New York Times reported that the event has earned “$25.4 million in media impact value” for the design house.

While a handful of wealthy shoppers are charmed by proximity to the brands that value their steady stream of cash (or the potential ROI they represent in the future), the general public is less enthusiastic about the bon vivant lifestyles of the upper crust. Predictably, there’s no shortage of opinions about the “advent of the sponcon wedding,” in the words of Highsnobiety, which joined other fashion and lifestyle media outlets in critiquing the Kardashian-Barker dalliance with Dolce & Gabbana.

Quotable: “Our biggest preoccupation is to protect our customers and in particular our pre-existing customers,” says Chanel’s chief financial officer Phillipe Blondiaux. “We’re going to invest in very protected boutiques to service clients in a very exclusive way.”

When: Until Nov. 27

Where: Piers 1, 2, and 3 at Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York

What: Popping up throughout Brooklyn Bridge Park are site-responsive artworks by Leila Babirye, Hugh Hayden, Dozie Kanu, Tau Lewis, and Kiyan Williams—makers who came of age in an era of globalization and digital connectedness yet share an interest in the handmade. As a whole, the works create an exchange of ideas among artists of a similar generation and subvert monolithic notions of Blackness. “I was drawn to the idea of assembling a group of sculptors whose practice involves material exploration and an element of the handmade,” says Hayden, who conceived of the show alongside Public Art Fund adjunct curator Daniel S. Palmer. “It speaks to the idea of materializing a vision for the future and crafting your own identity.”

The historic Brooklyn waterfront served as a colonial-era ferry landing, maritime harbor, and vital shipping port through the 1970s, and formed part of the network linking Africa and Europe with the Americas and the Caribbean. “Black Atlantic”—named after the book by Paul Gilroy—explores these threads of connection and highlights the complex identities that developed through this exchange over centuries along transatlantic routes. Among the highlights: Hayden’s own wooden wrecked dinghy that nods to Winslow Homer and Kerry James Marshall, a concrete chaise that evokes psychoanalysis by Kanu, and Babirye’s groups of totemic sculptures adorned with jewelry-like metallic flourishes.

Carly Krieger seeks out the rare and unordinary when sourcing pieces for Past Lives Studio, which collects, refurbishes, and customizes 20th-century furniture and decor objects made by celebrated artisans from around the world. Sourced from Sweden, the Spåtrumma round area rug by artist Per Isak Juuso was designed and produced in the town of Mertajärvi in 1999. It’s an extremely rare piece, made of 100 percent hand-tufted wool and bordered with camel-colored reindeer leather.

The rug’s bold use of primary colors is complemented by the leather border, which grounds it while adding an additional textural element. Juuso grew up in a region of northern Sweden inhabited by reindeer herders, which provides rich context to the frequent use of reindeer in his work. Signed 2/15, the piece was the second of a very limited production of 15 rugs. Its vibrant hues of ocher and cobalt blue challenge the preconceived notions of a singular expression of Scandinavian design.

With a spate of high-value auctions netting Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips more than $2.5 billion so far in 2022, the art market is hot. In May alone, Christie’s auctioned a 1964 Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe for $195 million—the highest auction price for a 20th-century work. The holdings from the bitter divorce between billionaire couple Harry and Linda Macklowe, a 65-piece collection comprising blue-chip names like Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Alberto Giacometti, recently garnered Sotheby’s a staggering $922 million to become the most valuable collection ever sold at auction.

These tentpole sales join a Phillips auction of a Jean-Michel Basquiat canvas for $95 million, a Pablo Picasso sale at Sotheby’s for $67.5 million, and two works by Mark Rothko that sold at Christie’s for $116.4 million. The market boom is venturing beyond fine art, too—the world’s largest blue diamond to ever be auctioned sold for $57.5 million at Sotheby’s and Mercedes just nabbed $142 million for a rare 1955 Mercedes-Benz SLR coupe, making it the most expensive vehicle sale in history.

What’s fueling the skyrocketing sales? Economic uncertainty. According to Bendor Grosvenor, an art historian and former dealer, the recent high sales volume suggests that wealthy buyers view art as a “longer-term hedge as an asset” amid a turbulent financial market.

M. Shively Art and Design crafts furniture, lighting, and sculptural objects for the home and hospitality settings that are distilled from childlike curiosity and expressed in exquisite forms.

Surface Says: Imaginative home furnishings and custom jobs are M. Shively’s specialties. One of its seminal designs, the Beam Table, illustrates its unconventional approach; it boasts a singular wooden plank encapsulated by lucite, giving the beam the appearance of being suspended in thin air.

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