20th-Century threads - fashion art, SoHo Guggenheim, New York, New York - Art & Fashion

Art in America, Sept, 1997 by Eleanor Heartney

The Mario Merz/Jil Sander collaboration was hardest to make out from the model. It was a huge, glass-ended cylinder in which leaves were blown about in Merz's signature spiral motion. The prize for most perplexing collaboration would have to go to Damien Hirst and Miuccia Prada, who transformed one of Isozaki's pavilions into a barnyard populated by live chicken and goats.

If one viewed the pavilion projects as a friendly competition between fashion designers and artists, it was the more inventive and unpredictable artists who seemed to come out the winners. In terms of market share and cultural influence, however, it's fashion designers who have the upper hand. The implications of this unequal power in the larger society is one of the intriguing questions which the exhibition failed to probe. Despite its ambitions to take on serious issues raised by its subject, in the end "Art/Fashion" seemed more interested in inviting its audience on a pleasant flight from reality, not unlike that encouraged by the fashion industry itself.