What’s Happening: Five decades after the enigmatic Land Artist’s untimely death, he continues to lay the groundwork for artists eager to explore our relationship with the planet.

The Download: Robert Smithson was a scrappy 22-year-old unknown when a painting imbued with Catholic mysticism caught the eye of a Roman gallerist in New York, kickstarting his career and a benefactor relationship with arts patron Virgina Dwan. He’d go on to briefly flirt with Pop and Catholic art, but pivoted to earthen materials. He started exploring industrial areas in his home state of New Jersey and became transfixed by trucks excavating tons of earth and rock. That yielded a trove of sculptures made from industrial materials in the ensuing years—and a lifelong fascination with the thermodynamic principle of entropy. It would be some time, though, before he realized the monumental Land Art opuses that expanded what art could be and where it could be found, and have come to define his legacy.

Chief among these is Spiral Jetty (1970), a giant earthwork made of mud, salt crystals, and basalt rocks forming a 1,500-foot-long hypnotic coil jutting out from a remote part of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. He’d realize one more—Broken Circle/Spiral Hill in the Netherlands—but died in 1973, at age 35, in a plane crash while photographing the almost-complete Amarillo Ramp in Texas. (His wife, fellow artist Nancy Holt, completed it one month later.) While Smithson’s outsize impact on Land Art is well-documented, his works face a precarious future amid a warming climate. Heavy rains submerged Spiral Jetty by the time he died, and it would only reappear a few times until 2002, when droughts shrunk the lake by two-thirds.

His extant works are in good hands with Dia Art Foundation and the Holt/Smithson Foundation, which Holt willed into being upon her death, in 2014. But perceptions of Land Art are shifting. One of Smithson’s works saw him dump a giant barrel of industrial glue in British Columbia; others question the ethics of white artists making permanent works on Indigenous lands. The notion that Land Art is rife with masculine gestures—egotistical monuments disturbing nature to valorize the sole creative genius behind them—is also inescapable. (See Michael Heizer’s behemoth, City.) But, five decades after Smithson’s death, his beguiling art continues to lay the groundwork for those eager to explore our relationship with the planet.

In Their Own Words: “I like landscapes that suggest prehistory,” Smithson once said. “As an artist, it is sort of interesting to take on the persona of a geological agent where man actually becomes part of that process rather than overcoming it.”

Surface Says: Now might be a good occasion to snag a copy of Smithson’s first biography, authored by Suzaan Boettger.

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Situated between the verdant cliffs of Punta de Mita, the Susurros del Corazón hotel, part of the Auberge Resorts Collection, is a new oceanfront retreat overlooking the turquoise waters of Bahía de Banderas. Each of the resort’s 59 rooms and 30 villas offer indoor-outdoor spaces with private terraces and nature-framing windows. Open-plan layouts, designed by Glazier Le Architects, feature floor-to-ceiling sliding doors opening to ocean views or large private terraces, many with plunge pools, that are cooled by the breezes rolling off the bay.

The culinary program is a back-to-the-land experience, with seafood staples infused with local flavors. The resort’s signature, farmhouse-inspired restaurant, Casamilpa, offers menus inspired by the local Huichol people who originally practiced sustenance farming. The resort’s pools and beaches serve bright and fresh Mexican favorites, all accompanied by tropical cocktails in a sun-drenched setting. The on-site boutique, Fashionkind, offers a selection of impact-focused luxury fashion and accessories, with housewares and resortwear from leading Latin American designers. The signature feature: moments of quiet reflection and renewal.

For the past four years, the jeweler’s iconic Fifth Avenue facade has been under wraps. A sweeping renovation by Peter Marino and OMA New York’s Shohei Shigematsu has finally come to an end, and with it, the scaffolding has come off and The Landmark—the building’s new moniker—has thrown open its doors. Among the highlights: an extensive art program featuring works by Rashid Johnson, Anna Weyant, and other heavy-hitters, along with a haute salon for the house’s high jewelry collection and Patek Philippe timepieces. Guests can enjoy Daniel Boulud’s Blue Box Café, which serves high tea, pâtisserie, and, naturally, breakfast. We hear the powder rooms are getting rave reviews.

It would be selling short the talents of Anna Burles and Chris Trotman to simply call them designers. The founders of London-based firm Run for the Hills are chiefly storytellers, conceiving everything from graphics and websites to interiors, furniture, and joinery to ensure their clients’ message resonates. A multitude of high-profile bars and restaurants—among them Yeast Bakery and Paradise Green in London, and the woodsy Faern Arosa Altein hotel in the Swiss Alps—have entrusted their top-to-bottom approach with stellar results.

Meta introduced Threads months after Twitter started plunging into chaos at the hands of Elon Musk, but early signs show a major uphill battle for the new text-based social media platform. It experienced a surge in sign-ups with a record 100 million users in just five days, but data from Sensor Tower and Similarweb indicates a drastic 50 percent decline in user engagement since its launch. The integration with Instagram and Meta’s backing may provide an advantage, but Threads may need a more compelling value proposition to compete with other social apps and slide into users’ daily social media routines.

Located in historic Richmond, Virginia, McKinnon & Harris is the leading manufacturer of high-performance aluminum outdoor furniture for estates, gardens, and yachts. The brand’s master craftspeople practice old-world metalworking techniques paired with cutting-edge technology.

Surface Says: McKinnon & Harris crafts furniture to endure, outperform, and outlast all others. Each piece can remain outdoors year-round, even in the most aggressive environments.

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