Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When Prada Marfa was unveiled in 2005, Instagram did not exist and mobile phones with cameras were still a rare sight. “We knew there were art tourists going to Marfa because of the Chinati and Donald Judd foundations,” recalls Ingar Dragset, one half of Elmgreen & Dragset, the Berlin-based duo behind the project. “We thought maybe rumours would go around in the art world and they would stop by on the way.” Flash forward two decades and the life-size sculpture of a Prada store, located not in Marfa but 30 minutes away in Valentine, Texas, has museum status, and is visited by tens of thousands of people every year. Beyoncé has been photographed leaping in the air in front of it, and it has appeared on The Simpsons (Homer relieved himself on the premises). Gossip Girl’s Lily van der Woodsen has a Prada Marfa artwork in her Upper East Side apartment. It has become a must-visit destination in the state, even for those who have little interest in art and others who, despite the coverage, still think they can shop there. This year marks its 20th anniversary. The artists’ intention was to let Prada Marfa, originally a symbol of gentrification, deteriorate over time. They were interested, Dragset says, “in the creative and generative potential of decay”. But also: “We didn’t think it would be possible to keep it up for very long. Who would care enough to look after it?” Looking back, the pair can see that their work has taken on new meaning. Droves of people trek out into the desert, to a town with a population of fewer than 100, to see the installation, which is now maintained. It’s surreal and faintly comic how popular it’s become. “You can have a laugh about yourself as a consumer when you observe this work,” says Dragset.Elmgreen & Dragset originally envisaged a shop with no product inside, a follow-up of sorts to a 2001 show in New York where they covered a gallery’s windows with a sign that read “opening soon” with the Prada logo beneath. It was inspired by the news that a Prada shop would be replacing the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, at a time when art dealers and galleries were being priced out of the area. A Prada store popping up in the middle of the desert was an extension of the same ideas. It’s the only luxury boutique where you can only window shop“We didn’t ask Prada permission to do it,” Michael Elmgreen says of that 2001 show. “But since this was permanent, we thought maybe it was the right thing to ask.” Yvonne Force Villareal of the Art Production Fund, the organisation that the artists approached to help realise the work, reached out to the Fondazione Prada having heard that Miuccia Prada was a fan of Elmgreen & Dragset’s work and had visited Marfa herself in the 1990s. Villareal not only got permission to use the Prada logo, but also a swatch of the mint-green colour used in the boutiques, architectural dimensions to create accurate shelving and pedestals, and 20 pairs of shoes and six bags from the AW05 collection to display within. The sculpture was almost located in Nevada. “We liked the sound of it: Pra-da Ne-va-da,” Elmgreen laughs. But Marfa, home to Donald Judd’s foundation and the artistic community that followed, was a better fit. “It’s like a shrine in the landscape that you need to make a pilgrimage to,” says Elmgreen. Within three days of its opening, the site was vandalised: it was spray-painted with graffiti and burgled (someone used a pick-up truck to pull the door off and steal shoes and bags). “It was pretty radical, and I think it shocked the artists,” said Virginia Lebermann, co-founder of Ballroom Marfa, which co-produced the project. Prada graciously sent six more handbags, which now have cut-out bottoms; the single right-footed shoes were replaced by their left-foot counterparts. I first visited what Elmgreen calls “the only luxury boutique in the world where you can only window-shop” in 2007. My impression, as recorded in my notes, was of “shattered glass and bugs inside”. Today the site is regularly cleaned and repaired out of courtesy to locals. The last time the artists visited a few years ago, “we were kind of shocked to see the installation unchanged,” Dragset says. “Everything was almost as we had left it many years prior.” The only development is the ever-growing collection of locks, trinkets, shoes and other objects that adorn the building.The artists are currently thinking about how they might mark Prada Marfa’s birthday, and working on a series of new pavilions or “siblings”, starting with a bar in Thailand that only opens one day a month. But Marfa will always hold a special place in their hearts. “It reached out to an audience that is not interested in art,” says Elmgreen. As Villareal says: “It speaks to everybody.” 14880 US-90, Valentine, TX 79854, ballroommarfa.org
