We are very excited to welcome back our friend James Payne, the creator of Great Art Explained, the biggest art history channel on YouTube with over 2 million subscribers and over 60 million views worldwide.

In this talk, James Payne ofGreat Art Explainedexplores the radical moment in the late 1960s when artists abandoned museums and commercial spaces and turned instead to deserts, salt lakes, quarries and coastlines. At the centre is Robert Smithson, the visionary behindSpiral Jetty,a vast coil of rock and earth built into the Great Salt Lake in Utah that disappears and re-emerges with the shifting water levels.

But Smithson was not alone. This was the era of land art, when artists like Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, and Michael Heizer reshaped the landscape itself, creating works that could not be bought, moved, or easily owned.

Why build art in the middle of nowhere? Why make something that erodes, floods, or vanishes? And what does it mean to remove art from elite spaces and place it directly into the earth?

This is a story about scale, entropy, capitalism, ecology, and the limits of the art market. It’s about artists who rejected the white cube and instead used bulldozers as brushes. And it asks a question that feels more urgent than ever: who does art belong to, and where should it live?

A visually rich, story-driven evening in the Great Art Explained style - bringing big ideas down to earth.