Window shopping
They call them marketplaces, but I see them for what they are.
These arcades are theatrical spaces, everything dolled up and on display. There’s an undeniable sense of artificiality as well, representation even. As such, they have less in common with Medieval markets — bustling places of necessity and trade, subsistence and labor — and more in common with the Palais Garnier. The arcades, in fact, almost completely oppose their “market” forbears, filled as they are with excess and currency, surplus and leisure.
Indeed, like the arcade shops, l’Opéra and other performance spaces exude conspicuous indulgence, leisure, and surfeit in its most decadent sense. At the theatre, people buy access to representations of a perfectly good, albeit gritty and asymmetrical, material world. At the arcades, people in perfectly good frocks and suits, ties and cravats, dresses and hats buy more of the same. Necessity is no part of either, and performance is all.
In the arcades, though, the bourgeois themselves perform: for each other and for the shopkeepers, dangling cash and coin like marionettes, twirling and sashaying like prima donnas, acting out the images they wish to be, playing out visions of how the world should be and the way man would make if only he had the power to do so.
To my eye, however, they achieve naught but penumbric selves. I see beyond the vacuous show playing out before me on kaleidoscopic floors. On work days, they’ll return to banks and politics and mercantile enterprises of their own. The performance will cease. I, though, will play the the part I always play. My true self, the disconnected dandy, the cultural aesthete, the camera-eye in the city. The arcade is my space. They are just poseur trespassers.
In contact with them today, this late Friday afternoon, frotting my way through the crowd, I felt as if I were making love to mannequins, offering those I brushed hot, lively flesh but receiving only cold porcelain in return.
