I have deciphered the secret of the sphere
Nicholas Clairmont
Like yours, my first glimpses of the Sphere in Las Vegas were online ones. I’d seen pictures and videos crop up in social media posts showing the glowing orb on the outskirts of the Vegas skyline and in the banner images atop a rash of recent stories in the press by writers in places such as the Atlantic and the Paris Review who, I noticed, had more dazzled reactions than I would have expected. In fact, they seemed to be more dazzled than they had expected. So when a recent road trip out west occasioned a stopover in Sin City, I was looking forward to seeing it in the steel.
Under construction since 2019 as part of a deal between the Madison Square Garden Company and Las Vegas Sands Corporation, the $2.3 billion arena came online with its 580,000-square-foot exterior screen flashing a “hello world” message in October 2023. Now jointly owned by MSG and something called the Sphere Entertainment Company after the initial ownership deal fell apart, it already makes for such a highlight of the Vegas skyline that, when I went to book hotel rooms, several of the Strip resorts offered an option for more expensive “Sphere View” rooms. As it happened, while I cheaped out and didn’t pay for a Sphere view, my first in-person look at the object in question came as I walked into my room in the Horseshoe and looked over the bed and out the window.
WHAT LEFT-WING IDEOLOGY HAS WROUGHT
And yeah, wow. “Awe” is the only word to describe my reaction at seeing the gigantic thing displaying first a sort of psychedelic kaleidoscope spin, then a basketball, then turning to a squat yellow cartoon minion in a Santa hat, and then an ad for itself in clear, sharp lettering. I had simply never seen anything like it. I have been to Epcot, and I have been to the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, with its 87-foot-across model of the sun hanging inside a glass cube. These aren’t just incomparable. They’re not even relevant to the effect of the Sphere. I’m a rational man of the 21st century, but I had a tickling urge to please the Sphere and make sure it knew I was trying to do Its will. Maybe I could set out some burnt offerings to the Sphere or at least light a candle to it, I joked to my wife. But some primordial part of me that has no role in deciding things here in the modern world wasn’t really joking. It’s just that looming and that different from everything else my gaze strikes that it has a certain effect.
Many objects are spheroid, including the one we live on. But what is Sphere-like? After that first blast of it, I didn’t even think of the Great Pyramid of Giza. I thought of two other, very different things. First, I considered the Sphere as an objet d’art. I thought about Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp’s famous artwork Fountain, which was just a urinal placed on display in a high art exhibit in New York in 1917. Duchamp explained that works such as this, stripped of their purpose and looked at in the context of an exhibit — “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice” — demanded of the viewer that he would think about the shape itself, the abstract statuary of the urinal alone, apart from what we do in it. Obviously, he was having a bit of fun being divisive. But anyway, here I was in Vegas thinking about him 106 years later because the Sphere is ultimately the same shape as a soccer ball, covered with the same sort of screen technology I have in my pocket or as the flat-screen TV in the room I first encountered it in has on its wall. Soccer balls and TVs don’t grab you, though, as the Sphere does.
That brought me to my second way of trying to make sense of how frankly embarrassingly enraptured I was by the Sphere: cargo cults. Famously, uncontacted Melanesian islanders during World War II were so struck by what they saw happening around them as planes flew overhead, airdropped supplies, and crashed nearby that it became a centerpiece of their religious and economic life. They would make idols of planes, with one of the cargo cults named the John Frum cult by an anthropologist because they oriented their society around a few visitors they had met who had introduced themselves as “John from …” (Philly, Pasadena, wherever). The same anthropological effect was satirized in the 1980 classic comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy, which sees a Botswanan San tribesman come across an empty Coca-Cola bottle that fell onto the soft earth from a passing bush plane. So unnaturally clear and smooth is the object, so unlike everything else the tribesman knows is this product of industrial manufactury, that it starts a series of events that threatens to tear apart his entire world and that of his society.
The Sphere’s sheer futuristicness and unlikeness to anything else I had encountered made me a sort of worshipful cargo cultist. This is no minor architectural accomplishment, especially when you consider that the thing sits next to probably the most dense cluster of show-offy futuristic, pointless entertainment venues in the world.
But then, the spell broke. It wasn’t that it got old — even as I wandered around Vegas for three days, I never managed to catch sight of the Sphere without being floored. The problem was that I went inside.
For an absurd 169 bucks, I bought tickets to Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky’s made-for-the-Sphere movie Postcard From Earth, about which the less said, the better. This meant that on a sunny afternoon, I trekked around the Venetian and right up to the beguiling LEDs that make up the screened Sphere surface to wait in a long line to be in one of the three daily showings that fill what seems like a designated half of the total 18,600 seats the venue contains for concert use.
Disenchantment hit right at the entrance. First off, I am one of the roughly 100% of citizens of modern society who is a bit of a tech paranoiac. (How many of your friends believe the official story that the ads you are served online have nothing to do with what you say near your phone or Alexa-type device?) So the entire aesthetic experience of entering the Sphere’s interior sets off alarms. There are notices that you will be subject to facial recognition, something the Madison Square Garden Company has used to ban business enemies from seeing concerts.
In the middle of Vegas, your phone loses signal the moment you encounter a helpful sign with instructions for accessing the WiFi you now need to access your tickets. Once inside, you are in a glowing blue atrium, three stories tall, slashed across by escalators, with decorative rings hanging in the air. Concession stands note they do not take cash, but there are “reverse ATMs” that will convert your cash to a charge card. All this happens, that is, once you head past the humanoid robots, who are (which are!) conversing with the passing crowd. “I like your pigtails, Jenny,” one crooned, leaning over to make “eye contact” with a wide-eyed little girl as I walked up. It blinked. It shouldn’t blink. In the next throng, people lined up to get into the “avatar scanner” that would send them a 3D cartoon rendering of themselves for use in the Metaverse. (Some people, I hear, feel that life is not online enough. Others are not named Mark Zuckerberg.)
You ride the elevator up from this chamber of horrors, all of it thrumming with a sound that is supposed to be a sort of futuristic version of muzak but in fact sounds like the noises Deckard’s hovering car makes in Blade Runner. There are apparently unattended concession stands with Topo Chico hard seltzers and Coorses and waters in rows of fridges that also glow a calming blue, labels all perfectly aligned with one another. Clearly, it is somebody’s job to hang out all day in a luminescent, humming room, inconspicuously making sure the labels line up. I wonder how much that pays an hour.
Here you enter the venue itself, which is a nearly sheer cliff of seats looking out at the interior curve of a screen so clear it makes 1080p look like NES — or, if this were a concert like the residency U2 did here recently, down at the stage. Any big sports arena has a steep incline, but this one would be no good for someone who is afraid of heights. You feel like you would not fall out of your seat but rather fall off the entire seating area and plummet down somewhere out of your field of vision. Which, it turns out, is the point, since when the screen is actually on, the all-encompassingness is far past any planetarium show, filling even your peripheral vision entirely with images that are, it feels, even clearer than real life.
And, at this first-in-life experience, the people sitting in front of me reflexively whipped out their phones and started recording video, as is now expected at any concert or wonder-worthy moment in life. Everything ephemeral must be captured, after all, even if what you are trying to capture is a panoramic screen technology that, by its very nature, obviously cannot be captured by the iPhone you are missing it to stare into, living your life through a lens that threatens to keep you from living a real life at all.
And here is where it struck me: Screens and digital cameras, as they get better, can give us a simulacrum of seeing the Pyramids or the Grand Canyon, or flying in a U2 spy plane, or seeing the band U2, or watching a time-lapse of the construction of the Las Vegas Sphere’s 13,000-ton steel roof. And we all watch this sort of thing almost every day, getting gradually less impressed by the majesty of nature and human ingenuity as we scroll and swipe and click. Today, a person has already seen a good screen-based representation of almost every object before they see it for the first time in real life. But the one thing a screen cannot capture well at all is another screen.
This is why most movies won’t show texting by looking over the hero’s shoulder at a phone but rather by depicting the conversation some other way. And this is why the Sphere, being a screen, is difficult to convey in the images it is now routinely captured in by Vegas visitors posting on X or Instagram or the like. That’s why encountering it in real life is so arresting.
The awe I felt seeing the screen-covered Sphere, I realized, was just the shock of novelty seeing something that, as someone who stares at screens too much, screens can’t depict. Like the villagers in The Gods Must Be Crazy, when we come upon the Sphere, we are dazzled by an impressive product of modern technology but ultimately, a trivial, empty one.
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Nicholas Clairmont is Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.