Central Park Goes to Hell in a Handbag

Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld have done Vuitton and Marc Jacobs one better. Or, much more accurately, one worse.

Vuitton merely usurped nonprofit museum space for commercial purposes. Chanel will invade a swath of public land to promote its brand: Its players will overtake Rumsey Playfield in New York's Central Park, Oct. 20 to Nov. 9, with "Mobile Art," a futuristic pod designed by Zaha Hadid to display Chanel-commissioned art, "at least in part inspired by Chanel's classic...quilted-style chain handbag" (above), as reported today by Carol Vogel in the NY Times.

Mentioning (as city officials did) this cynical business transaction in the same breath with Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's Gates or Olafur Eliasson's current Waterfalls is an outrageous insult to those laudable public art projects, both of which were artist-generated, without commercial purpose.

In case you have any doubt that Chanel's park perk is an advertising gambit masquerading as an art exhibition, just go to the website that you are encouraged to visit to book timed tickets, click on "Exhibition," then "Inspiration," and you can admire the parade of Chanel products and read the description of what the company's sandbagged handbag artists are up to:

Their unique visions...reveal the multiple facets of this emblematic bag in all the artistic expresssions.

It's all about the pocketbook. But, neither the company, the city nor the Central Park Conservancy would tell Vogel the exact price at which Central Park's public land can be bought. According to Vogel, the fashion company will pay the city a $400,000 "use fee," and "officials familiar with the project, requesting anonymity in deference to Chanel, said that the fashion house was donating a sum 'in the low seven figures' to the Central Park Conservancy."

No such deference should be accorded. The public has a right to know the going price for its parkland. Better yet, it should insist that there's no price high enough to justify allowing Central Park to be used as a billboard.