- The Sphere is a distillation of an evolving relationship among art, artist, and technology—somewhere between a warm embrace of and a final surrender to screens. It is an acknowledgment and maybe even a tribute to the ways in which our screens have become extensions of ourselves and the way that documentation via these screens has become its own form of consumption and participation. Seeing is believing, but what the Sphere suggests is that documenting has become inextricable from living.
If you had told me that Jason Gay and the WSJ would win who wore it better against Charlie Warzel and The Atlantic, I would never have believed you. Nonetheless. Instead: U2. A sturdy if careful choice, the Irish act closing in on 50 years together, its original membership uniformly sexagenarian. Not the hottest of the hot, but certainly famous. You know who they are, you know some of their names (Bono! Edge!) and you definitely know a few of their hits, which they play around a two-hour-plus set anchored by their gritty, lively 1991 album, Achtung Baby. No strangers to stadium rock, they know the assignment here, which is, in effect, opening for a waterfall of weapons-grade technology. No matter where you sit, a walk into Sphere is a stunner: a spare stage centered at the bottom, and a screen with 16K resolution launching heavenward like the side of a reactor. It’s so vast it’s impossible to absorb all at once. New buildings often claim unprecedented features, usually nonsense, but Sphere’s Wonka interior made me giggle. I felt inside a wonder: the biggest, most immersive planetarium-slash-TV on earth. As a middle-aged male, I was immediately seized by a desire to watch “Monday Night Football” and the entire third season of “Succession.”