Vanessa Beecroft, Show (with shoes and garments by Gucci), Guggenheim Museum, 1998

The sculptural individuals of the setups of Juan Muñoz, as the toy characters in the models by Rem Koolhaas, place the human figure as a hinge between art and life, museum and fashion. Varied and monochrome like the clay warriors of Xi’an, but at the same time repeated and predictable as mannequins, they turn the exhibition hall into a shop window, the shop into a gallery, and through their intelligent fusion of commerce and spectacle they give shape to the ultimate utopia of fiction-architecture, one that after edges and warps finds in textile figuration the final frontier of its dissolution in fashion. The museum is in fashion if fashion is in the museum, and just as the iconic Marilyn of Andy Warhol is printed on the prêt-à-porter dress, Versace, Dior or Pertegaz are exhibited in museum halls: the same Guggenheim that displays Armani serves Matthew Barney to shoot Cremaster or Vanessa Beecroft to design a setup of models with Gucci shoes and lingerie. Architecture and art blur in the shadows and mirrors of a fictitious world, a brightly lit commercial theater whose interior landscapes invite to dance a terminal tango that freezes the Dionisiac spirit of the dance in the immobile choreography of a halted pas-à-deux...[+]