Art, commerce, and “retail swank”

Peter Schjeldahl’s Murakami writeup in the New Yorker is worth reading, even though, or maybe because, he’s not a Murakami fan. His favorite bit of the show was actually the Vuitton store outside:

The shop is lovely. Shelving units in chrome and white enamel, with recessed fluorescent lighting that sets brass fittings on the merchandise aglint, caress the eye. They provide a haven from the strident grotesquerie of what might be termed Murakami’s fine-art product lines: paintings, sculpture, and wallpapered environments that play off the charms of Japanese traditional and popular arts with close to no charm of their own.

But, then, retail swank is an aesthetic lingua franca today …

The rest here.