RAI Corporation Internship Program

On Fifth Avenue, very close to the MoMA, there is a place which is not mentioned in the guides as a proper museum, but it permits me not to feel guilty if I haven’t visited the “canonical” exhibits of the city yet. It does not force you to leave the streets, so full of continuous stimulus, to enter a close silent place, and offers all the flavors of Manhattan: eclectic art, the constant contact with pop culture and the need of dreaming. At the same time, it gives you the most vivid and psychedelic portrait of the city itself.

Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury goods department store on Fifth Avenue offers pieces of arts in its windows, framed masterpieces where contemporary visionary artists are offered space to play with the creations of the biggest names of the fashion world. The results are stunning: postmodern ironic and iconic portraits, able to combine the stimulus of the contemporary culture and the city to the languages of the classically conceived works of art.

For the 2009 Holiday, the theme is A Compendium of Curiosities, inspired to Alice in Wonderland: in each windows, Lewis Carrol’s characters take life in a Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, Christian Louboutin or Monique Lhuiller creations, portrayed in a psychedelic-Victorian world made of juxtaposed spaces, little infinite miniatures of staircases, dollhouses, gloomy embalmed animals, cards and roulette wheels.

The “exhibit” continues inside, in the upper floor of the shop (the Decorative Home department), where the most surreal and artistic (and expensive) Christmas decorations are: submarine or wild jungle themed ornaments for the tree, tabby and psychedelic socks for the cheminee, whreats in perfect Studio54 style.

Bergdorf Goodman’s windows change every three or four weeks. My favouirite masterpiece? One of November “sculptures”, a work from an Artist of the American Visionary Art Museum of Baltimore, featuring Oscar de la Renta: a sensual and cybernetic version of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.

Valeria