Before it was a street, it was more of a sewer than a canal, a sluggish waterway flowing down into the Hudson, bringing the city’s garbage along with it. This past summer, about half a nautical mile from that river at what is now 301 Canal Street, a curious little storefront put a collection of contemporary “garbage” on display. Behind a set of perpetually locked double doors, a Chinatown studio–sized space lined with shelves displayed about two dozen designer handbags, each lit from below. Mirrors mounted on either side of the space projected the installation to infinity. Without the telling outer layer of Saran wrap or the blue tarp backdrop, measures that linked the objects to their industrial production and abandoned the theatrics of luxury marketing, it was practically impossible to tell that these bags were fakes.
The front, mounted by the luxury recommerce behemoth The RealReal, behaved as a virtual opposite of Elmgreen & Dragset’s infamously alluring Prada Marfa sculpture (2005): Here, a desert was inserted into one of the richest, most active stretches of M…