The Store turned art viewing into an inviting shopping experience

Evidence

Unlike the Doom Show (or The Street), The Store was welcoming and abundant—less an installation than an environment. Visitors could be shoppers, admiring and even handling the items on display walls. Writing in Kulchur, Frank O’Hara was moved to poetry: “You find cakes your mother never baked, letters you never received, jackets you never stole when you broke into that apartment, and a bride that did not pose for Rembrandt’s famous Jewish ceremony.” The show was so popular that Oldenburg kept it open through January, although it supposedly lost money ($285) and much of its inventory remained unsold. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 229

Categorization

• SEED: The Store as proto-gentrification: an art environment that treats the neighborhood bodega as aesthetic content — feeds the reader’s artist-as-advance-guard thesis.