Chanel's art project housed in Zaha Hadid's sculptural pod
http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/visual-art/hadid-chanel-and-art-in-central-park/636/
No, a UFO has not landed in Central Park. It’s just Mobile Art, Chanel’s Contemporary Art Container plopped on Rumsey Playfield. It is Zaha Hadid’s first edifice in New York, a swooping futuristic nautilus that feels like a sci-fi movie come true. Chanel commissioned a group of contemporary artists to create work taking the company’s famous boxy 2.55 handbag as a starting point, which some did literally, some conceptually.
When the Mobile Art project was conceived a while back, and even when it bowed in Hong Kong in February 2008, it was likely incomprehensible that the state of the national and world economies would be where they currently are. Some visitors may view it as if it were a year ago – as a celebration of a top purveyor of luxury leather goods enshrined in a similarly haute setting by one of the world’s most admired avant-garde architects.
Others may feel that it’s a time stamp on a period of unlimited greed and profligacy which ended with a restructuring of the big financial institutions, and resulting in the most precarious financial state since the Great Depression. As well as a frivolous confection that takes up real estate in the park.
