Soft SellSOFT SELL

New York City’s Forty-Second Street is a marketplace where successive forms of currency have supplanted one another throughout history: high-society entertainment gave way to cabaret culture, which later yielded to the movie industry, then to popular amusements, commercial sex and illicit drugs, and, most recently, to fashionable merchandise and family entertainment.

Soft Sell is a video installation at the entrance to the Rialto Theatre, an abandoned porn theater at the intersection of Forty-Second Street and Seventh Avenue. Using one of pornography’s most familiar devices, the close-up, a pair of female lips, projected onto the theater’s entrance doors, recites a litany of improbable solicitations to passersby in a sensual voice that emanates from the intercom in the ticket-booth window. Liquid-crystal panels embedded in the facade intermittently phase to transparent peepholes revealing a jeweler’s box emblazoned with one of four words—discreet, innocent, genteel, and virtuous—that stand in counterpoint to the licentious terms displayed on the theater’s front wall: shameless, savage, sinful, and scandalous. The installation on the marquee is by Jenny Holzer.