“If you can appreciate real art, make some mother-fucking noise!” Lil Wayne was addressing a packed tight, phones-up LA crowd that must truly have loved their art, because they did exactly as he suggested. It was after midnight this past Saturday in LA’s Arts District, and Prada’s Double Club was at its point of crescendo.
Watching from the bar was Carsten Höller, the contemporary artist recruited by Miuccia Prada to mastermind his third episode of Prada’s progressive experiment in creative hedonism. “Look at all the phones,” he said: “If they are raising the phones, that’s a compliment.” Höller is the artist responsible for the famous slide that was installed in Prada’s Milan office back in 1999. First in London (2008) and then Miami (2017) he partnered with Fondazione Prada to create The Double Club—an ephemeral experiment dedicated to colliding art, fashion, and music in order to stimulate joy. “What I’m interested in with my installations is taking away the middle ground,” said Höller: “I want you to feel the extremes. Because that provokes a very interesting state of mind. And actually, it is quite difficult to achieve.”
This time round, Höller and Prada recruited Drake to help formulate that extreme. The Double Club was installed alongside Luna Luna, the Drake-operated revival of a 1987 Hamburg amusement park with rides created by artists including Basquiat, Keith Haring, David Hockney, and Salvador Dali. And Drake curated the second night of performance, which was headlined by Lil Wayne and Travis Scott alongside Pedro, Bianca Lexis, DJ Reflex, and the awesome DJ Pee .Wee (Anderson .Paak).
Höller’s installation space nodded to Luna Luna (he visited the fairground first time round) via the installation of roller coasters, swing chairs, and a carousel—all of which ran all night long and for free. And it reflected the double agenda of Prada’s project by carving the space into a series of incrementally elevated stages, each one exactly half the area of the next, in order to create a blocky, brutalist spiral centerpiece in the heart of the room. This was illuminated with hundreds of multicolored light bulbs. Said Höller: “it’s placing the rationality of the division against the sensuality of the musical experience.”
By throwing this edition of The Double Club over Oscars weekend, Höller and Prada created the conditions for protagonists of another creative discipline to engage in their multi-disciplinary melee. Actors including Letitia Wright, Shay Mitchell, Hunter Schafer, Hunter Doohan, and Olivia Perez were some of the guests spotted on the step-and-repeat, and there were further cameos from party goers who came on from the Friday night shindigs thrown by Hollywood stalwarts William Morris Endeavor and Creative Artists Agency.
Both nights the music was preceded by dinners hosted by Brutalisten, the Stockholm restaurant founded by Höller whose avant-garde cuisine rejects “mayonnaise culture” to serve dishes made from single ingredients. Höller observed: “It’s a luxury in some sense, because it gives you something you don’t need to decide upon. You can let go, and take the leap, and surrender.” Both nights ended in surrender too as Prada’s heaving crowd of LA sybarites danced and drank with abandon: this was definitely far crazier and way more interesting than your average fashion party.
