I don't know much about Chanel. A bag. An outrageously expensive hand bag, that I know. It's a scent, too. A number. A 5. It's a lifestyle most New Yorkers dream to live that only Park Avenue denizens can. And, oh, that it's created by size zero Karl Lagerfeld.
Zaha Hadid is larger than life - literally and figuratively. That she's the toast of the architectural world speaks volumes. She wouldn't exactly fit in a couture Chanel - we'll leave that to Karl - but she did fit inside her building the biggest Chanel quilted bag ever created.
A traveling exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the iconic bag, Mobile Art launched in Hong Kong in April 2008 and will make its final stop in Paris in February 2010. Now on a layover at the Rumsey Playfield in Central Park, the futuristic pavilion funded by the luxury brand Chanel and designed by Iraq-born and London-based Zaha Hadid features the interpretations of the bag by some of the most prominent (installation) artists of the 21st century.
The mp3-guided tour takes you on a voyeuristic 35-minute ride, nah, walk through the ritzy and kitschy, and for added touch, raunchy. A female voice, unmistakably old and not-so-oddly French-accented, keeps you company all throughout. She leaves you sometimes, of course, to self-explore. Suddenly, she returns, catching you unawares with your hands on your wares so to speak.
Beyond the hilarity of flabby Caucasian women scrambling for, fighting over and bodyboarding on a Chanel bag, the very pubic display of Asian women, unmistakably Chinese, provides a mons-trose counterpoint to an otherwise predictable art of gaudy furniture pervasive in one cubicle. An homage perhaps to Chanel's biggest market at the moment. But come on now.
And Yoko Ono's wishing tree? Seriously!
