Park life of luxury

Hyde Park, Summer Pavilion by Frank Gehry in construction, July 2008

If you call yourself a londoner and you don't live in the vicinity of Hyde Park, chances are you visit the place only on the odd sunny Sunday when you didn't have enough faith in BBC weather to plan a trip to the country or to the sea side. Once in a while, I take a walk through the park just to remind myself of the first impression I had of London when I got here over four years ago. It's orderly, pretty, clean. Nothing bad could ever really happen in Hyde Park, except when it comes to art... Indeed, no walk through the park is complete without a visit of the Serpentine gallery.

Each year, the Serpentine commissions an architect or an artist to design a temporary pavilion that will house the events of the season. The gallery itself being quite small, this serves the practical purpose of an enlarged capacity during the tourist laden Summer months. When the Autumn comes around, the small building (bigger than most two bedroom flats in London) is sold to a private collector who no doubt has a huge garden or an aircraft hanger to house it.

This year the pavilion was designed by American architect/occasional jewelry designer Frank Gehry who says of his construction: “The Pavilion is designed as a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the existing Gallery. Inside the Pavilion, glass canopies are hung from the wooden structure to protect the interior from wind and rain and provide for shade during sunny days. The Pavilion is much like an amphitheatre, designed to serve as a place for live events, music, performance, discussion and debate.” As I walk by, builders are still working on it and the thing looks a lot like chaos: a mess of timber, steel and textured glass sticking out at odd angles. I don't quite see an urban street, I certainly fail to see an amphitheatre, but this is one rare building that is more or less exempt of the dictates of practicality. It is art, it is the talk of the town, it is vanity project. Actually, it is ornament. Like a shiny piece of jewelry that has no purpose other than to attract attention and admiration. It's doesn't really come as a surprise that Tiffany&Co. should sponsor it then.

There has been over the recent years a growing number of art projects funded by luxury labels. To see another example, I needed only to step inside the Serpentine where the Richard Prince show is sponsored by Louis Vuitton. Just like Takashi Murakami before him, Prince has appropriated the legendary Vuitton logo to produce very expensive bags. Is that art? I never quite know what is art and what isn't with Richard Prince. His tongue-in-cheek references to popular culture are easily accessible: car culture, pornography, romance novels, great American myths. Mostly based on found images, they are sometimes slightly tweaked, like the naughty nurses with their exposed lingerie and paint dribble eyes, or just made bigger than life such as the enlarged photographs of cowboys and actresses.

Richard Prince

Student Nurse, 2005

Acrylic and inkjet on canvas193 x 137.2 cm

© 2008 Richard Prince

Yet, the resulting works are so often (voluntarily) poorly executed that it's hard to take pleasure in their sheer superficiality. They are fun to look at but empty and redundant. We get that naked chicks and cars have a long standing partnership in the average pantheon of male fantasies but to plaster the naked chicks on the car is perhaps a bit literal and lazy no? A car plastered with vintage pornography makes for a funny sight in a highbrow gallery, but that's about it.

Richard Prince: Continuation

Serpentine Gallery, London (26 June - 7 September 2008)

Installation view© 2008 Richard PrincePhotograph: Jerry Hardman-Jones

The combination of the Tiffany pavilion and the Vuitton art left me thinking that art is perhaps more than ever perceived like a luxury good. I would be hard pressed to try and differentiate the handbag from the print: the price is similar, it is signed by the same artist, it's just as aesthetically pleasing. What's the difference? Oh, yes, the handbag has a purpose...