In 1993, Paul Hasegawa-Overacker, an aspiring artist and avid surfer, launched a New York cable-access program on the Manhattan art world. Called Gallery Beat and described by its creator as "hopelessly and endlessly public access," the show follows Hasegawa-Overacker as he visits galleries, gets tossed out of museums, and interviews bewildered artists. Often joined by cohorts Walter Robinson (former editor for Art in America, now the editor for Artnet's Web magazine), Cathy Lebowitz (an editor for Art in America), and Spencer Tunick (a photographer), Hasegawa-Overacker ultimately created 160 half-hour episodes.

In 1970, artist Robert Smithson rejected the gleaming white gallery spaces and "canonical" minimalism of the New York art scene in search of an entirely different setting for his sculpture. After several exploratory trips, he selected a spot more than 2,000 miles from the Big Apple: Utah's Great Salt Lake. Rozel Point, on the northeast end of the lake's Gunnison Bay, would become the home of his most important piece of sculpture: Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot-long, 15-foot-wide, 6,650-ton coil of black basalt rock and mounded earth extending counterclockwise into the pinkish water of the lake. The site was remote but not virgin territory. Oil seeped from the ground, and scattered around the lake were the derelict instruments from prior efforts to extract that oil.