How Do You Sell a Work of Art Built Into the Earth?

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Almost 50 years ago, Robert Smithson, along with his fellow artists Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria and other adventurous colleagues, pioneered earthworks, an audacious — and short-lived — movement of the 20th century. Named for a sci-fi novel that Smithson read in 1967, earthworks represented a new genre of landscape art. Instead of painting a view of nature, sculptors created their own massive works outdoors on mesas, moraines and even the floor of the Mojave Desert. In 1971, Mr. Heizer told me: “You can’t really find a harsher climate than where a majority of my work exists right now. It’s in semiarid, flat, windy, heavy rainy season areas.”

Rather than using chisels, mallets or welding torches, sculptors rented bulldozers, front-end loaders, backhoes and other heavy-duty vehicles to excavate and construct these behemoths. And they found patrons to subsidize them.

“A work on this scale doesn’t end with a ‘show,’” Smithson pithily declared in 1971 in Arts magazine. Having gone to so much trouble, artists wanted their constructions to last indefinitely. And that’s what happened. Monumental works of art such as Mr. Heizer’s “Double Negative,” a long, difficult drive from Las Vegas, and Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” located along the banks of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, realized in 1970 and ’71, continue to attract thousands of visitors a year.

The original earthworks were never meant to be sold like paintings or statues. That was partly in keeping with the hippie, yippie tenor of the times. They have never come up for auction, although one sculpture fetched as high as $4 million in 2008.

How would you even sell an earthwork? I had never pondered the question until a few months ago, when I made my own pilgrimage to see “Broken Circle/Spiral Hill,” a 1971 work by Smithson in Emmen, a town in northeastern Netherlands. The only large earthwork he executed outside the United States, it is in a sand quarry on property owned by Gerard de Boer.

Mr. de Boer told me he was contemplating the sale of his quarry business, along with the lake and surrounding property on which Smithson constructed “Broken Circle/Spiral Hill.” Since his own childhood home, now a mini-museum devoted to Smithson’s earthwork, is still there, too, Mr. de Boer pictured the property possibly becoming an artist’s retreat in the hands of a new custodian.

To get to Emmen from Amsterdam, you change trains twice. The trip generally takes two and a half to three hours.

Smithson constructed his earthwork at the invitation of Sonsbeek ’71, a major outdoor sculpture exhibition. According to a news release from that year discovered in an archive in Amsterdam, “‘Broken Circle/Spiral Hill’ was originally commissioned as a temporary public artwork.” At the time, “No (written) agreements were made concerning the ownership and future maintenance of the work.”

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