Vogue

What We’re Doing This Weekend: Hitting SoHo’s Bowie 75 Pop-Up

Vogue article by Corey Seymour, October 29, 2021

First things first: The just-opened Bowie 75 space at 150 Wooster in SoHo isn’t a David Bowie museum, and it isn’t a capsule version of the recent acclaimed traveling exhibition David Bowie Is—but it’s much more than a mere shop. I mean, yes: It’s filled with Bowie T-shirts and sweatshirts and box sets, books, scarves, picture discs, rare and limited-edition vinyl, jigsaw puzzles, an ever-changing display of limited-edition art prints, patches, stickers, sweaters, and jewelry, with much of the merchandise not easily available anywhere else. But it also features an immense video screen showing rare and never-before-seen Bowie footage; there’s a cut-up-magnet wall where you can move around Bowie lyrics (to mimic the lyrical composition technique that Bowie himself appropriated from William Burroughs); there’s a custom K2 phone box modeled after the one seen on the Ziggy Stardust album sleeve (there’s a sister shop operating on the phone box’s actual street in London, Heddon Street), and when you step inside and shut the door and place the receiver next to your ear, you’ll hear Bowie speaking to you.

What does Bowie tell you? I don’t want to spoil the surprise—he has a few things to share, let’s say that—but among them is a brief unfolding of his particular understanding of art, in which he says that “my interpretation of my work is really immaterial…I think art is for the public to interpret and use almost like a sustenance to life.”

The notion mimicked almost exactly something that Donny McCaslin—a saxophonist who features heavily on Bowie’s final album, Blackstar—told me at the press opening of Bowie 75, about the process of working with Bowie. “It was tremendously affirming,” McCaslin said. “He provided the framework of these great songs, but he also gave us total freedom to do whatever we wanted with them.”

Henry Hey—the musical director of Lazarus, Bowie’s 2015 Broadway musical—expressed similar thoughts. “David found people whose abilities and artistic integrity he valued and then invited you to create in his space.”

Perhaps the most impressive thing created as part of Bowie 75, though, is the black tent at the back of the space, inside of which is an array of speakers and some powerful technology in the form of Sony’s 360 Reality Audio. Step inside the tent, sit down on the bench in the center of the room, and you’ll likely have the kind of listening experience you’ve never had before, as instruments and voices and ethereal sounds emerge from the space all around you. Having heard “Space Oddity” some 50 million times over the course of my life, I heard it here anew, with entire pieces of the composition revealed to me for the first time.

The space—which will be open through January—will also host a series of appearances and talks by Bowie scholars and collaborators.

“I have this theory that the biggest David Bowie fan hasn’t been identified yet,” said Lawrence Peryer, the curator who put Bowie 75 together. “I keep thinking: There are Shakespeare scholars, there are Mozart aficionados. It doesn’t seem that far-fetched that the biggest David Bowie fan could be 10 years old right now. We want to nurture that. We want somebody to come and learn about him and get sucked into the universe.”