Had to pick up some gifts at Smith & Caughey in the city so I thought, might as well see that Olafur Eliasson exhibit at the Auckland Gallery, as well as those Impressionists generously gifted by a wealthy, Republican-supporting American hedge-fund one-percenter, the late Julian Robertson.

“My wife didn’t like the Picasso,” Robertson says in a video clip during an interview with a New Zealand journalist some years back, “…so I put it in the bathroom.”

The collection includes several other Picassos, a Cézanne, a Gauguin, a Matisse, several Braques, and works by lesser-known (or perhaps just less famous) artists.

The Eliasson exhibition was fun. Various rooms featured playful light installations that invited you to see yourself as projected multi-colored shadows. One dark room sprayed a fine mist of water, which captured and reflected light like a rainbow.

But my favorite was an installation of frozen river ice, slowly melting into a metal cistern. The dripping water was amplified to create a mournfully elegant audio effect.

The Robertsons would have loved the installation and probably wouldn’t have thought twice about installing it in their swanky 6,000-square-foot Central Park apartment.

After all, nothing says “soothing bedtime ambiance” like the sound of the planet dying—especially when you know it won’t really affect you.