A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a lined with gold leaf. Visible from the street and dramatically lit at night,
better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. the installation is the most beautiful object on the Drive. More than
Andy Warhol, 1985
anything else on view – the pretty dresses and the impeccable suits
and the fancy gimcrack – it is a true work of art.
But is it an artwork?
NoN-Site 90210
They wanted what we did to come across as a serious work of art… ‘Belle hAleiNe, eAu de Violette’, 1921,
They saw the potential in the reception, that it would come across photocollAge
as ‘Louis Vuitton did a serious work of art’.
Danish conceptualist Olafur Eliasson, New York Magazine,
In a futuristic pavilion created by the architect Zaha Hadid, some
9 November 2006
twenty internationally renowned artists will exhibit work that was
inspired by the elements that give the Chanel bag its identity.
Their unique visions, unexpected interpretations – poetic, cheeky
It’s hard enough to find a good book in Beverly Hills, let alone a serious and inspirational – cannot fail to reveal the multiple facets of this
work of art. Especially devoid of the latter is Rodeo Drive, the shiny legendary bag.
shopping bauble at its core. A 14-foot Torso (2003) by Robert Graham
Chanel’s Mobile Art press release, 10 June 2007
stands at the intersection with Dayton Way – its statuette version is
the ‘Oscar of fashion’ for the Beverly Hills Walk of Style Award. A fine
art gallery a block or so north offers immediate access to a wide variety When ‘superflat’ art star Takashi Murakami reinterprets a handbag for
of paintings, drawings and graphics in all price ranges. I dropped the Louis Vuitton, the result is a new handbag design, not a work of art.
quotation marks in that last line – you know where they go. When Pierre Huyghe designs a changing room for Dior, the result is a
While there may not be much art, there is some starchitecture: changing room. When Zaha Hadid, inspired by a handbag, designs a
Anderton Court Shops by Frank Lloyd Wright (‘the greatest visual Chanel Contemporary Art Container, the result is a building. But what
artist ever born and raised in America’, according to Robert Hughes do you call the handbag-inspired ‘contemporary art’ that it contains?
in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books); and the Prada What do you call a photograph by Nobuyoshi Araki of a naked woman
Epicenter, a three-floor facadeless retail ‘experience’ by Rem Koolhaas suspended in the ‘signature’ gold chains of a Chanel handbag?
(‘an artist and innovator in the vanguard’, according to the Praemium Returning to Olafur Eliasson’s comments about Louis Vuitton’s
Imperiale committee). desire for a ‘serious work of art’, what do you call a Louis Vuitton
The rest of Rodeo is pure commercial outlet – a three-block Christmas window display by Olafur Eliasson? What do you call a
strip of nondescript, anywhere-upmarket brandscape. Louis Vuitton elevator by Olafur Eliasson?
And that’s as it should be. Rodeo Drive is aggressively and Back on Rodeo Drive, is the colossal necklace specially
brazenly about shopping – ‘shopping as shopping’, as Koolhaas puts commissioned for Chanel – ‘the iconic modern woman, Mademoiselle
it. Yes, the aspirational branding blather applies, but as Koolhaas might Chanel was seldom seen without her pearls’ – a ‘serious work of art’? It
say, the bottom line is, well, the bottom line: Rodeo Drive does not want certainly has ‘serious’ artworld cred. Its creator is Jean-Michel Othoniel,
to sell you a bill of goods; it wants to sell you a bunch of stuff. whose jewel-like installations have adorned the Pompidou, the Louvre,
Tate Liverpool, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the
Fondation Cartier. Installed in any of these institutions, or in Emmanuel
Art Shop, Shop Art Perrotin, Othoniel’s Paris gallery, the art/not-art question would never
arise. Why would it? In 1961 Robert Rauschenberg sent a telegram
Art Nouveau botanical prints at Prada, hand-painted brush to the gallerist Iris Clert proclaiming, ‘This is a portrait of Iris Clert if
strokes at Dolce & Gabbana, luminous blocks of color at Jil Sander I say so’; at the Mobile Art conference that accompanied Hadid’s Art
– fashion week here was an Italian renaissance, the runways filled Container, Karl Lagerfeld said, “Design and architecture are the real
with moving artwork. art of today. Otherwise, it is just a question of point of view, a gallery’s
Los Angeles Times, 7 October 2007
decision as to what is and what is not art.”
Bracketing for now the phenomenological and design-and-
architecture-as-art debates, let’s focus on context. Does something
Koolhaas’s ‘experiential space’ is driven by high-tech Prada yada about happen to a work of art when it hangs in a shop window? How does
aura and spectacle, but the art isn’t in the store; if anything, it is the store it maintain its integrity as art? And in an art age of hypertrophied
(and of course, the clothes – ‘true works of art’, as the collocation goes). market, where curators, dealers and directors leapfrog to and fro, from
‘Artwork’ in the traditional sense – paintings, photographs, prints, films, gallery to auction house to art fair to public art institution, and artists
books, sculptures, videos – are in the Fondazione Prada in Milan. like Murakami put their stamp on brands and sell the resulting merch
The newly redesigned Chanel flagship on the corner of Rodeo at twice the Rodeo Drive price in installation-cum-shops as part of
Drive and Brighton Way seeks to be seen and viewed differently. Peter midcareer retrospectives – what can integrity possibly mean?
Marino’s very present facade of white microglass in a grid of blackened Bear with me as the rhetorical deluge renarrows: what keeps
steel mimics the famous Chanel N˚5 perfume box. Hundreds of Othoniel’s necklace from becoming store decor? Would it be a work
backlit Chanel monograms glow inside the wall of the terraced top of art if made out of identical elements but by a window dresser? Is
floor. In between, a large second-storey window displays a 105-foot- Othoniel, in this context, a window dresser?
long double strand of hand-blown Murano glass balls extravagantly I’ll stop there – the questions are naive and miss the point.
selling out.indd 59 4/12/07 16:53:30
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