John Yau's essay on Jasper Johns keeps looking lands this week alongside a story that, at first glance, belongs to an entirely different universe: Waymo offering cities pothole data harvested by its fleet of robotaxis as a byproduct of the sensors required to keep passengers alive. The connection is not metaphorical. It is methodological.

Attention as Infrastructure

Johns spent his career making the over-looked strange again. Flags. Numbers. Maps. Objects so familiar they had become invisible, and Johns restored their strangeness by looking at them with a precision that felt almost computational. Waymo's potholes are the inverse: the city's deterioration is so ubiquitous that municipal governments have stopped seeing it clearly. The robotaxi sees it because it has to, because the road surface is a safety variable, not an aesthetic one. Both Johns and Waymo are, functionally, observation systems that produce value precisely because they cannot afford to look away. Yau notes that Johns has never lost his love for art while recognizing that nothing stays in time. Waymo's pothole maps will be obsolete within months. The act of sustained attention is the product, not the data it generates.

The New Deal Parallel

The Atlantic's piece on New Deal murals in federal buildings adds a third point to this triangle. Those murals were commissioned as a form of institutionalized looking: the government paying artists to make the American landscape, its workers and landscapes and contradictions, visible to the people who passed through bureaucratic spaces daily. The Forest Service's current dismantling echoes here. Defunding the institutions that look at land systematically is, like ignoring potholes, a choice to stop seeing. Johns would recognize this as a political act dressed as an administrative one. increasingly active in the gap left by retreating federal support.