“Do they do, like, Venmo?” Red Star asked her gallerist Allegra LaViola, on the way out, in a faux-fur coat, to shop for a bag for her luxury-loving sister.
LaViola laughed: “I think they do cold, hard cash.”
On Canal, Red Star encountered throngs of jostling venders standing over bags arranged on the sidewalk. She homed in on a Takashi Murakami Louis Vuitton number (the real thing goes for more than two thousand dollars). Asking price: $130; final bid: $100.
Police sirens blared, and the venders scooped up their wares and disappeared. Earlier this year, after ICE raided Canal Street, some Tribeca gallerists came under fire for holding a meeting about how to disperse venders outside their spaces; last week, a bill backed by Mayor Mamdani went into effect which basically decriminalized vending without a license.
Walking back, Red Star discussed the cost of actual antique trade beads. “A string can sometimes be five hundred or a thousand, but you can find individual ones for maybe eight dollars,” she said. “I go to Etsy and eBay, or, if I’m near a reservation, a lot of times pawnshops will have them.”
LaViola greeted her at the door. “Did you get a bag?”
“Yes! It was very exciting,” Red Star said. “And then to see them all pack up—it was really impressive. That’s why the bags are on sheets, but they also had little wagons.”
“How much?” LaViola asked.
“Well, they wanted one-thirty,” Red Star said, presenting the bag.
LaViola scoffed. “I would’ve gotten them down to, like, twenty-five bucks. Well, maybe sixty. This is terrible. Look at this workmanship! Also, it’s upside down.” Indeed, the rainbow “LV” logos were printed the wrong way up.
“Your problem is, you had the artist go out and negotiate,” Red Star said.
“Your sister will burn this on a pyre,” LaViola replied. She reminisced about being in L.A. with Red Star, at a Murakami show at the Broad. “Wendy’s sister was there and she wanted Murakami to sign a bag she’d brought with her, and he was, like, ‘I’m not giving autographs.’ ”
They tracked him down outside later and he signed the purse. “He actually drew some cherries on it,” Red Star recalled. Might that make the bag too valuable to use as a bag?
“It’s a collector’s item now,” LaViola said.
