Anish Kapoor: Sky Mirror

I suppose you could accuse Anish Kapoor of being a crowd pleaser.


Because he totally is.

Twice I've had the pleasure to view and hang around and play under his "Cloud Gate" (more affectionally known as the "shiny bean") in Chicago's Millenium Park, and it's been surrounded by grinning, giddy mobs. Now Kapoor has given New York City reason to smile with his magnificent Sky Mirror, unveiled this week in Rockefeller Center.

Weighing in at 23 tons and (somewhat precariously) leaning three stories high over Fifth Avenue's bustling sidewalk, the round Sky Mirror is basically what it sounds like: a massive stainless steel mirror, concave to the west, convex to the east. And so the side facing 30 Rock literally turns the world upside down, and the side facing Fifth bends and stretches your view and is alive with the colors and movement of the street. Kapoor calls this sort of sculpture a "non-object", because despite its monumental size, it really suggests a void, filled with whatever wanders into its vicinity.

The Sky Mirror is only around until October 27, and it's the type of piece you'll have no problem enjoying two or three times, because it never looks the same (as you can tell, Scoboco went on a gray day... but we'd love to also see the concave side with a blue sky and puffy white clouds). And because any work of art that makes you think about and see the world in a new way—especially a part of the world that is as familiar and iconic as Rockefeller Center—is doing its job well. And because it'll make you happy.