Ahem. Longer-term readers of my other properties know how enamored I am of free public art installations, from the likes of Cristo (in the Rockies of my youth, and more recently — Central Park in NYC), to Banksy… and beyond.

This is doubly delightful, since it is both officially anonymous, and clearly directly channels… excellent space based sci-fi.

For anyone who hasn’t yet seen the story… it “arrived” some weeks or perhaps even years… prior, in the copper-colored rocky-cliffed desert south of Moab, but was just “discovered” last week — only to now have “vanished into thin air“(!?) — over this long weekend.

If that doesn’t clearly ring in — as a worthy nod to Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” [and “2010“, the less celebrated sequel]… I don’t know what would. [To be fair, this one is/was a three sided monolith, not the black orthotope / right rectangular prism shape, from those Clarke novellas — but the allusion is… unmistakable.] Here’s a bit, from the NYT:

…It was a mystery how the monolith had been installed in the first place. Lt. Nick Street, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, said this week that the monolith had been embedded into the rock.

“Somebody took the time to use some type of concrete-cutting tool or something to really dig down, almost in the exact shape of the object, and embed it really well,” he said. “It’s odd. There are roads close by, but to haul the materials to cut into the rock, and haul the metal, which is taller than 12 feet in sections — to do all that in that remote spot is definitely interesting.”

Officials said that the structure was most likely a work of art and that its installation on public land was illegal. It was unclear who had put it there — and when — but the art world quickly speculated that it was the work of John McCracken, a sculptor fond of science fiction. He died in 2011.

His son, Patrick McCracken, told The New York Times this week that his father had told him in 2002 that “he would like to leave his artwork in remote places to be discovered later….”

While officials declined to disclose the monolith’s location, some people had tracked it down. David Surber, who visited the structure this week and posted videos of it on Instagram, said it was located near Lockhart Basin Road, which is south of Moab.

Mr. Surber, who trekked to the monolith, posted about its disappearance on his Instagram story on Saturday night. “Apparently the monolith is gone,” he said. “Nature returned back to her natural state I suppose. . . .”

Almost as clever a stunt as the Banksy self-shredding gold framed item, at Christie’s auction house of 2018, or any of his month long, city by city “guerilla” installation projects, over the last decade. Lovely.

Perhaps all it is… is a form, for some form-less… intelligence, only temporarily visiting.

Grinning widely now, and looking to the night skies, south by southwest-ward….

नमस्ते