Last week, a Kaws painting of SpongeBob Square Pants smashed through pre-auction estimates to sell for roughly $6 million dollars at auction. For perspective, a Norman Rockwell piece sold the same week for $6.5. Kaws is an artist whose work continues to punch through every ceiling set by dealers – perhaps our appetite for street art reflects the insatiable hunger the world still seems to hold for street wear and sneaker culture. Or perhaps it simply mirrors our bigger need to hold onto the gentler childhood icons in an increasingly violent time and place. Either way, that’s a lot of krabby patties!

Yes – your allergies HAVE gotten worse. This fascinating article points to the decade long favoring of male trees by city arborists as the lead cause of the increasingly eye watering pollen outbreaks of recent years.

Summer means road trips, and we are all about Santa Fe, New Mexico! Right now, this magical city has two scintillating reasons to head to the land of Enchantment.

1) Bel Canto: Contemporary Artists Explore Opera
Running through September 1, this new exhibit pages homage to the famed Sante Fe Opera by inviting contemporary artists to examine themes of race, gender & class within the stories, tradition, architecture and music of opera. Both sumptuous and revealing, this is a big and deep curation.

Feel like that’s a bit too serious for summer ‘tripping? How about a deeply immersive and totally fantastical journey into a whole new way of seeing the world?

2) MeowWolf
(do you really need more of a reason than that NAME??)

Head to Meow Wolf, a wildly creative arts and entertainment hub based in Santa Fe. This radical group of over 300 artists creates immersive and interactive experiences that transport audiences into fantastic realms of story and exploration including art installations, video and music productions and extended reality content. Meow World champions otherness, weirdness, challenging norms, radical inclusion and the power of creativity to change the world.

We, at the ScoutLook, believe every person has a story. Three of our fave instagram accounts seem to agree, capturing the human visage in unique and wonderful ways.

Michael-Birch Pierce creates free motion embroidered portraits of the people who populate his world in Savannah, Georgia.

Sarah Nisbett sketches the faces of strangers on the NYC subway, and imagines their life stories…

duskysphere uses her eyes full of wonder to capture the fantastical world of fashion and beauty as it happens moment to moment.