Times Square Art Guide
Times Square gets a bad rap, and fair enough — the Elmo impersonators aren’t exactly helping anyone’s cultural IQ. But underneath the ticker tape and the tourist-trap restaurants, there’s a genuine and occasionally brilliant art scene operating in plain sight, if you know where to look.
1. Midnight Moment — The World’s Largest Digital Gallery
Broadway between 42nd and 49th Streets
Every night at 11:57 p.m., something quietly radical happens in Times Square: the advertising stops. For three minutes, more than twenty of the district’s largest digital billboards are taken over by synchronized works of contemporary art as part of Midnight Moment, a program launched in May 2012 by the Times Square Advertising Coalition and Times Square Arts. The screens — normally hawking underwear and Broadway musicals at roughly $100,000 per minute in airtime — run a single artist’s vision, free, for anyone standing on the street.
The roster of past contributors reads like a survey of contemporary art’s most ambitious names: Yoko Ono, Björk, JR, Tracey Emin, Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Isaac Julien, Ryoji Ikeda, Ryan McGinley, Andy Warhol’s rarely screened 1960s Screen Tests (featuring Bob Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, and Allen Ginsberg), and dozens more. Each month’s commission is different, and the program has consistently pushed well beyond the obvious crowd-pleaser — Warhol’s silent slow-motion portraits of the Factory crowd are about as far from a Times Square advertisement as you can get.
The best place to watch is the Broadway Plaza between 43rd and 44th Streets, where you can see multiple screens simultaneously. Come early, stay late, and don’t make the mistake of watching on your phone.
2. Max Neuhaus, “Times Square”
Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets (pedestrian island)
Stand on the grate. You’ll hear it. A dense, warm, humming chord rises through the metal lattice of the subway ventilation shaft — not quite music, not quite noise, but unmistakably intentional. This is Max Neuhaus’s Times Square, a permanent sound installation that is, depending on your tolerance for the conceptual, either the best-hidden artwork in New York or the most obvious one nobody notices.
Neuhaus, the American sound art pioneer who helped establish the genre with works in the 1960s and 1970s, first installed the piece in 1977, during Times Square’s notorious pre-cleanup era — a very different context than today’s sanitized tourist corridor. It ran until 1992, then returned as a permanent installation in 2002, supported by the Dia Art Foundation, and has run continuously since. The sound emanates from speakers mounted inside the ventilation shaft below, generating what Neuhaus described as being “outside of time.” It is his only permanent installation in the United States.
The piece is deliberately without signage, explanation, or attribution. Most of the 400,000 daily visitors to Times Square walk directly over it. Whether you find that melancholy or thrilling probably says something about you.
3. James Turrell, “Plain Dress 2006”
505 Fifth Avenue
A few blocks south and east of the main chaos, the lobby of 505 Fifth Avenue contains one of the more undervisited Turrell works in the city — and given that Turrell installations routinely command six-figure admission fees at dedicated museum experiences, the fact that this one is free and accessible during business hours borders on absurd.
“Plain Dress 2006” was commissioned as a permanent site-specific work for the office building lobby, created in collaboration with the architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. The designers noted early on that their renderings reminded them of Turrell’s work and approached the artist directly. The result transforms the lobby into a slow-shifting field of colored LED light washed across stucco walls — closer in spirit to the color-field paintings of Rothko than to any decorative lobby art. Where Flavin’s fluorescent light installations tend toward the clinical, Turrell’s work here is enveloping, a little disorienting, and genuinely meditative in the way only Turrell manages.
It is the artist’s permanent work closest to Times Square, and the contrast between the frenzy outside and the interior stillness is worth the walk on its own.
4. Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, “Moveable Type”
The New York Times Building, 620 Eighth Avenue
The Renzo Piano-designed New York Times headquarters on Eighth Avenue houses one of the most sophisticated permanent data artworks in the country. “Moveable Type,” commissioned specifically for the lobby by artists Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, runs across 560 small screens embedded in the walls on either side of the entrance — a installation that stretches the entire width of the lobby and pulses with the continuous output of 150 years of the newspaper’s archive alongside a live feed of current articles and reader comments.
The algorithm is exacting. Quotes beginning with “I” are paired with quotes beginning with “you.” News items are sorted into categories and displayed with a frequency that reflects the ebb and flow of current events. Letters to the editor appear slowly, as if being typed. The screens occasionally work in waves, and the sensation of a century of newsprint washing over you is genuinely strange — not quite readable, not quite abstract, somewhere between archive and organism. Rubin and Hansen describe it as a living entity, which sounds like artist-speak until you’ve actually stood in front of it for a while.
Accessible to the public during regular business hours.
5. Roy Lichtenstein, “Times Square Mural”
42nd Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal subway station
Lichtenstein completed this ceramic tile mural in 1994, three years before his death, as a commissioned work for a planned renovation of the 42nd Street subway station. The renovation never happened; the mural sat in storage for eight years until the MTA quietly installed it in 2002. It has been there ever since, surviving the daily assault of one of the busiest transit hubs in the world, seen by millions of commuters who mostly don’t slow down long enough to read it.
The mural measures six feet high and fifty-three feet long, which is generous even by Lichtenstein’s standards. The subject is the history of New York transportation — running from the construction of the first subway line in 1904 through increasingly speculative visions of future transit, including a winged spacecraft hovering in front of Ben-Day dot skyscrapers while a Buck Rogers figure watches from the foreground. It is unmistakably Lichtenstein: bold outlines, primary colors, the flat graphic language he derived from commercial printing that became his signature. It is also one of the few major works by a canonical twentieth-century artist that you can see for the price of a subway fare.
6. One Times Square and the New Year’s Eve Ball
1 Times Square, 1475 Broadway
The building at the apex of the bowtie is, by almost any architectural standard, a mediocre piece of real estate — a slender 1904 Beaux-Arts office tower by Cyrus Eidlitz that was stripped of its facade in the 1990s when it became more profitable as a billboard surface than an office building. It is now effectively a 25-story advertising structure with a famous tradition bolted to the top.
The New Year’s Eve ball drop began here in 1907, when metalworker Jacob Starr of the sign company Artkraft Strauss lowered the first ball — a 700-pound iron and wood sphere studded with 100 light bulbs, five feet in diameter — from a flagpole at midnight on December 31st. Starr lowered it himself, and members of Artkraft Strauss continued to do so for most of the twentieth century. The current ball, which debuted in 2008 and was expanded in 2009 to its present twelve-foot diameter, is covered in 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles and lit by 32,256 LEDs. It descends sixty feet in sixty seconds.
The tradition predates Lichtenstein, predates Warhol, predates the very concept of Times Square as a cultural destination. Whether it qualifies as art is a question worth arguing.
7. Duffy Square and the TKTS Steps
Broadway and 47th Street
The raised red bleachers at the north end of the Times Square bowtie, designed by architects Perkins Eastman and completed in 2008, house the TKTS discount theater ticket booth below and provide a free elevated viewing platform above — one of the few places in Times Square where you can sit still and look at the lights without someone trying to sell you a comedy show ticket. The steps have become the de facto gathering point for Times Square Arts’ public programs, from Midnight Moment viewings to live performances timed to coincide with the nightly billboard takeover.
The plaza has hosted a rotating series of commissioned sculptures through Times Square Arts’ annual Valentine Heart Design Competition, organized in partnership with the Van Alen Institute since the mid-2000s. Works have ranged from Stereotank’s HeartBeat (2015), a heart-shaped percussion instrument that invited visitors to bang out rhythms together, to the Office for Creative Research’s data sculpture We Were Strangers Once Too (2017), which encoded census data on New York’s immigrant population into 33 color-coded steel poles that resolved into a heart from a specific viewpoint. The site is also where JR set up his Inside Out photo booth truck in 2013, printing oversized black-and-white portraits on the spot and pasting them directly onto the plaza ground.
8. The Brill Building
1619 Broadway
The Brill Building is not a gallery and does not advertise itself as a cultural destination, but it is one of the most consequential buildings in the history of American popular music, and its presence two blocks north of the main Times Square intersection is a reminder that the district’s creative history runs considerably deeper than digital billboards. Built in 1931 and named for the Brill brothers who bought it out of bankruptcy during the Depression, the building housed the densest concentration of songwriting talent in the world during the 1950s and 1960s — Neil Sedaka, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman all worked in its offices, churning out pop standards at an industrial pace.
The building’s commercial model — publishers, arrangers, session musicians, and studios all stacked vertically in a single address — was eventually eclipsed by the singer-songwriter era, but the Brill Building survived and continues to house music-industry tenants. Times Square Arts has used the lower level as a venue for immersive performance installations, including Jim Findlay’s Dream of the Red Chamber (2014), which invited audiences to experience the installation from provided beds. The lobby retains its original Art Deco detailing.
9. CitizenM Hotel Lobby Collection
218 West 50th Street
The CitizenM Hotel, two blocks north of the main Times Square corridor, operates on the sensible theory that hotel design and contemporary art are not mutually exclusive. The lobby — furnished with Vitra pieces, deliberately designed as a social space rather than a holding area — contains a permanent collection anchored by a large-scale Julian Opie installation and an Andy Warhol Beatrix portrait presiding over the room. Additional works from the collection include pieces by David LaChapelle, Daido Moriyama, and Florian Süssmayr.
The collection is not a gallery; it is a functioning hotel lobby, accessible without a room key. The espresso bar helps. If you’ve hit your tourist quota for the day and need a few minutes of genuine visual quality in an air-conditioned room, this is one of the better-kept non-secrets in the district.
Times Square is a place that resists easy cultural dismissal, even as it invites it. Max Neuhaus understood this when he put his sound piece in an unmarked ventilation grate in 1977. The Midnight Moment program understands it every night at 11:57. The art that survives here — the Lichtenstein in the subway, the Turrell around the corner, the Neuhaus underfoot — tends to be work that engages honestly with the scale and energy of the place rather than fighting it. Come after midnight, when the tourists have cleared and the lights are performing for nobody in particular. That’s when Times Square finally starts to feel like the art it was always pretending not to be.