From “Levitated Mass Hysteria,” Victoria Dailey’s new Los Angeles Review of Books essay about unusual things which hold the public in thrall, particularly Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

 “Southern California, long used to fads, bubbles and exaggerations, was recently in the grip of an event that Mackay would certainly have added to his anthology of popular frenzies. Not only did it harken back to the past when the transportation of granite obelisks created awe, and when colossal rocks exerted powerful forces upon humankind, it also incorporated the modern mania for fame and celebrity, demonstrating the incurable tendency to prefer myth over fact. This event centered around a rock — a 340-ton, 21-foot high, 150 million-year-old boulder that traveled across four Southern California counties in order to be installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

What inspired the popular interest in this megalith was a project devised by Michael Heizer, an artist known for land art, and Michael Govan, the director of LACMA. In 1969 Heizer, who was in the midst of creating several massive earthwork projects in the Nevada desert, envisioned finding an ideal boulder, then installing it within an art framework. The project was delayed for over four decades, because it seems the right boulder could not be found until the artist discovered one in a rock quarry in Riverside, California in 2006. It had been blasted from a mountainside, and was too big for the quarry’s purposes, so someone contacted Heizer about it. As Govan, a friend and supporter of the artist, stated: ‘Mike was calling from the Ontario [California] airport and said: ‘I found this amazing rock.’ […] He referred to it as the Colossi of Memnon and compared it to the great pink granite Egyptian obelisks for the quality of the stone. He said it was one of the greatest rocks he’d ever seen.'”

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The boulder arrives, March 10, 2012:

Teaser for Doug Pray’s film about the megalith: