Vanessa Beecroft's Louis Vuitton Performance Blurs Art and Commerce

On October 9, 2005, Vanessa Beecroft staged a performance inside the Louis Vuitton flagship store on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, recently renovated by architects Peter Marino and Eric Carlson. The store also features works by James Turrell, Tim White-Sobieski, and Olafur Eliasson, the latter contributing a discreet elevator intervention and a ceiling installation of 1,900 polished stainless-steel rods in the Atrium. Beecroft's performance took place in the third-floor Atrium, a curvilinear space dedicated to luggage sales, where she placed about twenty young women with alternating brown and white skin to echo the LV monogram. The models stood nude from the waist up, their hair covered in fine gauze, wearing sheer tights and heeled sandals with straps crossing to mid-thigh, constrained by shelving units. Critic Richard Leydier, writing in artpress, expresses discomfort not on moral grounds but because the performance's resulting images resemble basic luxury advertisements, lacking the critical edge of Beecroft's earlier work. He questions whether the Duchampian displacement still grants contemporary art an illusory added value when it is less imaginative than fashion and advertising. In January 2006, LVMH will open an art space on the seventh floor of the building, with Beecroft as the first exhibitor.