Knock it Off, Please
Thinking Twice About That $400 Handbag? Pshaw, hundreds are for
bourgeois losers; get back to me when you’ve made the leap into the
thousands.
Actually, I contemplated that leap for about two minutes yesterday. I doubt I’ve ever spent more than $40 on a purse so it was a remarkable thing to realistically ponder. I do not covet expensive items (well, minus Richard Woods’s colorful block printed woodgrain furniture. I can’t conjure up any way to justify $5,500 for a plywood dresser at this point in my life) and have never understood followers of brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton. I can’t think of anything less imaginative.
I don’t like aspirational status symbols. But I do like these Richard Prince for Louis Vuitton bags. I don’t follow art and wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m a Richard Prince fan or else I would’ve gone to his Guggenheim retrospective that ended a few weeks ago. Yet, it was his ‘80s work, especially the joke paintings, tickled me as an art student in the early ‘90s. I wasn’t old enough to appreciate them during their heyday (though I imagine a young Manhattan teen might be so savvy or are Gossip Girl types a modern invention?)
Or at least I like the idea of these $2,000+ bags, which is why I will wait and see what the counterfeiters do with these designs. Isn’t buying a reproduction of an appropriation artist’s joke-themed “art” the ultimate joke?
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