Luxury Face at GUCCIVUITTON

Wet streets in Little Haiti. No thrum from anyone last Monday—real Monday-like—but a bright light shined at the end of the block. Next-door, across the alley, there’s another place of worship, which is similar, but different, and from both, sermons are spilling onto northeast Second Avenue.

(Now, at the time of this writing, it’s Monday again and the carnival is packing up their tired elephants. Countless are maneuvering their dead-feeling bodies into the shower before the cab arrives, or before their 9-5 starts its process of again, and again, and again.)

Picture in your mind a series of banners: two lines of banners hanging parallel, fanning inward with a V-shape, forming a sort of closing hallway you may recognize from various nightmares or out-of-body experiences. The banners are colorful, and the type that hang along the sides of light posts and telephone poles that advertise upcoming events.

The banners contain big words in goofy rotating fonts and say things like “PHILOSOPHY” and “PRIMACY” and “NORWAY”. Some of them also contain bits of text in smaller fonts with poetic political musings, such as “dark finance” and “dark ecology” and “feed the ducks then go swimming, deluxe edition”.

These are big bold moves by the biggest, boldest, artist-run luxury retailer this side of the Design District’s expanding borders—GUCCIVUITTON, and Luxury Face, executed by Ida Eritsland, Geir Haraldseth and Agatha Wara in collaboration with Bjørnar Pedersen, is expected to produce highly valuated art works: through-the-roof!

I mean, these are some hard-hitting contemporary Norwegian heavyweights—not even artists, not even curators really—making some really kick-ass conceptual art works that you can actually probably purchase. There’s a guaranteed return on your investments: emotional and intellectual and spiritual.

In a place and time where everything might feel like a distraction, these are some really high-quality distractions. The offer commentary on things like The Internet, collective delusion, and the commodity fetishization disorders of the rich and famous and, quid pro quo, the “artists” who’ve forgotten that art is all about how far you can take the joke, and how long can you trick the bourgeoisie into holding your hand.

At the Luxury Face opening last Monday, we ate gold-dusted chococoated licorice candies from an airport in Copenhagen and learned interesting linguistic facts such as, “door wedge” and “tickle” are the same word in Norwegian, as is the word for “brain” and the phrase “I would love to.”