The Seduction of Display: Art, Commerce, and the Power of the Gaze

Is a shop window ever just a shop window? Fresh Window: The Art of Display & Display of Art, currently on view at Museum Tinguely in Basel, would argue not. The lens of the exhibition would position the shop window, typically part of the silent scaffolding of daily life, as actually a portal, a mirror, a tease; a carefully curated invitation into a world of desire. For centuries, the glass separating consumer from commodity has been a canvas for artistic expression, a silent stage where commerce and creativity perform a symbiotic dance. Fresh Window shatters this glass, the sharp edges of each falling shard etching a new story - the ink, the ingenuity of creators past and present. 

Centring a lineup of pioneers—Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Martha Rosler, and more—the exhibition exemplifies the tension, the flirtation, and the outright rebellion that has long existed between art and retail display. From the grandeur of early department stores to subversive installations that deconstruct consumer culture, Fresh Window invites us to look not just at what’s behind the glass, but at the very nature of even looking itself.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Untitled (Hand Photograph), from the series 25 Windows: A Portrait/Project for Bonwit Teller, 1976/2015. Color photography, approx. 35 x 28 cm

Before obsessively curated Pinterest collages and the glossy sheen of airbrushed magazine editorials, the shop window could be considered the ultimate mood board. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as department stores transformed shopping into a spectacle, storefronts became beautifully elaborate stage sets. Art Deco opulence seeped from these displays, with brands like Tiffany & Co. and Bonwit Teller commissioning artists to create fantastically dreamlike worlds; worlds where fantasy was as much part of the product experience as the items inside.

Rauschenberg’s Collection (1954/1955) in the windows of Bonwit Teller, as part of the department store’s annual Young American Artist’s Window Exhibit, January 29, 1957. Photo: Virginia Roehl. Dan Arje Papers, The New School Archive and Special Collections, The New School, New York, NY

In the 1950s, artist Robert Rauschenberg, often heralded as a neo-Dadaist, fixed his focus on the shopfront as his own personal artistic arena. His Combine paintings—layered, chaotic assemblages of commercial imagery, discarded materials, and painterly abstraction—echoed the messy collision of art and advertising. But it was Rauschenberg’s window displays for Bonwit Teller that revealed an ability to blur the line between commodity and concept. His artistic voice told the story of the shop window, not just as a passive showcase but as a stage for visual storytelling. The beauty in the installations were Rauschenberg’s flirtation with concepts of transparency, reflection, and distortion. Looking into a Rauschenberg window meant a non-verbal expression of consent to being stared at right back.

For Andy Warhol too, this latent power of the display window wasn’t just something to be understood; it was something to be harnessed, a liminal space to completely lose himself in. His early career was spent as a window dresser for department stores, an experience that bled into his later Pop Art practice. Warhol’s fascination with consumer culture was not cynical—it was adoring, obsessive, a mirror held up vainly as he boastfully admired the dazzling repetition of modern life. His screen-printed Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans explored consumer engagement with objects in the retail setting. But his work had always been about more than just branding, rather it was a materialisation of the nexus between repetition and presentation and how easily the banal can be transformed into the iconic.

Bonwit Teller window display featuring artwork by Andy Warhol © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Today, luxury brands still turn to artists to cross-dimensionally transform their window dressings, the art transporting the viewer into a realm defined by its cerebral and, definitely, more provocative undercurrent. Selfridges, Louis Vuitton, and Dover Street Market don’t just sell objects; they sell ideas, they sell fantasy. Fresh Window challenges us to consider where the true performance lies. In the decorative nature of the art, the reverence of the consumer, or even the seductive allure of capitalistic culture itself?

Art, of course, has never been content with simply being classed as decoration. Its primary discipline has always been interrogation, pushing back against the beautiful seduction of superficiality.

From House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967–72

Admire Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series, where she collaged images of the Vietnam War into idyllic mid-century home interiors, critiquing the way consumer culture anaesthetises us to the tangible and devastating effects of violence. Rosler’s work is brilliant at turning the implicit explicit. She screams at us that our shop windows, our magazine spreads, and digital storefronts are not neutral; they are deeply political spaces - a direct reflection (and partly, source) of the narratives we choose to consume.

Elmgreen & Dragset, a duo known for their deeply subversive installations, push this critique even further. Their Prada Marfa sculpture, a faux-luxury boutique marooned in the middle of the Texan desert, is the ultimate exercise in artistic subterfuge. Prada Marfa strips the shop window of its urban function, transmuting what is initially presented as a glimpse into the mundane into an absurd, almost surreal relic of consumer aspiration and inspiration. Their installation challenges us to think about luxury as a capitalist construct, and therefore, what really remains when the desire to purchase is removed from the equation? Does the store lose its power?

Elmgreen & Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2012 © 2024 ProLitteris, Zürich; Elmgreen & Dragset

It’s worth exploring, though, whether that supposed loss of power actually allows the store to become something more. Beyond commercial purpose, shop windows have always been social barometers, reflecting, and sometimes resisting, the world outside. They capture the cultural zeitgeist of a city, the politics of a moment and the aesthetic of an era. Think of the stark minimalism that typically follows economically recessive periods, the annual rainbow-covered displays of Pride Month, or even the eerie emptiness of storefronts during Coronavirus lockdowns.

Marcel Duchamp (the original disruptor!) quite literally gave us the Fresh Window (Fresh Widow) in 1920—a glass pane obscuring a delicate web of geometric forms. It was both a visual pun and a rejection of transparency — another example of the layered confrontation of what really lies behind the looking glass. Do we see a portal to authentic self-expression? A realm in which those peskily elusive dream lives may finally materialise? Is it all just a carefully manufactured illusion?

In a time when the high street dies a slow death at the hand of digitisation; a time when storefronts are as likely to be boarded up as they are to be dressed up, Fresh Window prompts us to ask: what IS the role of the shop display window today? Can it still be a space of wonder, or is it doomed to be a relic of a bygone era, frozen in time - a mere backdrop for the scrolling gaze of the digital consumer?

The beauty of a great display window has always been its ability to make us pause in awe—to freeze us mid-step, pulling us out of the monotony of daily existence. Fresh Window: The Art of Display & Display of Art is a call to look again, not just at the artistry behind the glass, but at the systems, the history, and the silent dialogues being energetically expressed in the eyes of inert mannequins.

Whether we find ourselves reflected, refracted, or completely disoriented in their brilliance, it is fair to say that one thing remains clear: a shop window is never just a shop window. In fact, it is an invitation to see, and to question, what we are really looking at.