The Sylvie Fleury pool at Villa Emslieb near Salzburg, Austria.

Lisa Marie Fernandez Farrah Maillot.

 
In honor of Austrian Conchita Wurst’s triumphant win of the Eurovision Song Contest, I’m bound for a Baroque manor outside Salzburg, where modernity is a foil for history. Contemporary art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac has peppered his painstaking restoration of Villa Emslieb, a county estate built in 1618, with primo pieces by Anslem Kiefer, Not Vital and George Baselitz, among other artists whom Ropac represents. If, by a stroke of high-art luck, I scored an invitation to the villa, I would swim laps (under the watchful eye of Tom Sachs’ bronze bunny fountain) in the black granite pool designed by Swiss conceptual artist Sylvie Fleury, each pass over the “Be Amazing” inlay magnifying the Wurstian clarion call.