I recently got an email announcing Prada Marfa’s 20^th anniversary, which spurred me to consider the piece—what it meant, what it means, why it works. And I surprised myself by wanting to write about it.

Prada Marfa is a tiny building made to look like a Prada boutique circa 2005, complete with authentic merchandise from the time. Sitting on a stretch of empty road about 26 miles from Marfa, deep in West Texas, it’s a permanent sculpture by the artists Elmgreen & Dragset, who describe the work as a "pop architectural land art project."[1] Originally intended to crumble into a ruin and be consumed by the desert, Prada Marfa has instead become a 21st century cultural icon, a well-maintained art destination. Here are some thoughts on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.

1. Regarding Marfa 

Prada Marfa wouldn’t exist if Marfa itself didn’t exist as an artworld hotspot.[2] Once a sleepy little town with a single blinking streetlight, Marfa (pop. 1,788) has for many years enjoyed a reputation as a glamorous hamlet visited by art and movie stars. The town has become a screen onto which people project a dream of Texas, whether that dream is about the austere minimalism of Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation, or movies like Giant and There Will Be Blood, which were filmed nearby. As a lifelong Texan, these things have little to do with what makes Texas cool, for me anyway—like everywhere else, Texas as a lived experience is very different from Texas as an aestheticized object. Therein lie the roots of my original skepticism about Prada Marfa; I never really bought into the Marfa fantasy, and therefore I never bought into Prada Marfa.

2. Regarding art about luxury brands 

Luxury brands, both the objects themselves and the mythmaking of advertising surrounding them, work like religion works—have even replaced religion for some people, allowing them to imagine a better version of themselves. But however beautiful or well-crafted it may be, a handbag or a pair of boots is a paltry substitute for a sense of connection to the infinite. Most contemporary art about luxury brands is tedious because it draws attention to this obvious fact. Ha ha, look at how we worship these luxury doo-dads, look at the existential meaninglessness of our totems of status, ha ha! You wouldn’t run across an ancient sculpture in the shape of a giant Hermès shopping bag in Pompeii or the Mexico City Zócalo, and not just because Hermès didn’t exist back then. People were always interested in displays of status, sure, but the badges of status were related to systems of religion or conquest. They weren’t themselves the status.

You could say that Prada Marfa is the art about luxury brands. For a long time, I thought that made it uninteresting, merely an ironic manifestation of the larger Marfa ethos of remote luxury. Prada Marfa, it seemed to me, was just an elaborate, posh one-liner.

3. Regarding one-liner art

A good punchline is both unexpected and instantly recognizable as an idea. What makes a joke work is the surprise of the known-all-along. Prada Marfa is a great punchline. We get the joke immediately: a too-tiny luxury boutique, forever closed, never open, sitting pointlessly in the rugged wilderness. No shoppers, no commerce around here to keep this place afloat as a going concern. The funny incongruity is obvious—and you get the sense that Prada Marfa is, in its no-comment way, in on the joke.

But how might the joke have evolved if Prada Marfa had been allowed, as originally intended, to crumble into a ruin, if 20 years of brutal West Texas weather and vandalism had been permitted to take their toll? The original joke becomes something else when the boutique-in-nowhere becomes a famous destination that’s kept up—still painted white, awnings replaced. The joke of the ruin has been replaced, for now anyway, by some version of meaning simply through accrued cultural sedimentation. 20 years on, Prada Marfa has transcended itself somehow. If the old adage is true that tragedy + time = comedy, then perhaps the opposite is also true: comedy + time = pathos. Or at least gravitas. Today, Prada Marfa has become too universally beloved and recognizable, too seriously visited as a pilgrimage site, to be merely a joke.

4. Regarding Pilgrimages 

And here we arrive at the idea that not only luxury brands, but contemporary art itself is a stand-in for old time religion—and Prada Marfa a stand-in for a religious pilgrimage site. A pilgrimage implies intentional difficulty and sacrifice to get there, and it’s not easy to make the journey to Prada Marfa. Up close, you can press your nose against the glass and see the real merch inside—just like the reliquaries and objects of devotion with religion. Religious pilgrimages serve a spiritual function, promising transformation through proximity. But with Prada Marfa, the community one bonds with, the attendant transformation one achieves through having visited it, is based on taste. Aesthetics. When we come to pray at the altar of Prada, we don’t mean anything by it. We aren’t looking to heal ourselves or our loved ones, aren’t looking for some kind of spiritual catharsis. We’re merely getting a feather in our cap for having been there. One doesn’t go to see Prada Marfa; one goes to have seen it, out there in the middle of nowhere.

5. It’s the landscape, stupid. 

You’ve finally arrived at Prada Marfa. You get out of your car in this two-lane stretch of highway, and you look both ways and it’s empty road as far as the eye can see. You look at this incongruous little thing—always littler in person than you expected. And if you can just sit with it a bit, not just take a selfie and move on, you see the thing for not only what it is, but where it is. And this, I think, is the real magic of Prada Marfa: because it doesn’t belong there, it draws attention to its environment. It draws attention away from itself. Prada Marfa inversely frames the horizon line, the distant mountains, the sky. This little box of a building makes you see this Earth even more starkly than all of Donald Judd’s concrete boxes—yes, Prada Marfa shows you the landscape better than Donald Judd does. And the reason for this is the incongruity—the joke, the one-liner, the fetishization of human aesthetics, the existentially meaningless luxury brand sitting in a place it has no business, literally, to be.

But here’s the thing: this magic, this transference of attention from Prada Marfa to the landscape, probably can only occur if you see the work in person, and only if you aren’t in a rush. And most of us just see it close up in a photograph. And most of us are in a rush.

6. The 3 essential questions 

I’ve heard that we’re all trying to answer three questions in life: Who am I? What is my purpose? and What really matters? And I think Prada Marfa, given a chance, gets us to those questions, as all good artworks do. Perhaps this is ironic; I mean, look at this thing, sitting in the desert, its backside covered with graffiti, its front preserved—what on earth are we doing, as a species, as a natural species, sprung from nature? The inevitable future ruin of this thing—it will crumble, eventually—is still baked into it. It takes little imagination to see this desert, decades or centuries hence, with the eroded foundation of Prada Marfa all that’s left of it, a fossil of free-market capitalism.

What really matters? Certainly not Prada Marfa—except inasmuch as it made me consider what we’re up to as a species. This little joke of a fake store that has always refused to explain itself drew my attention to the nature of existence. It was, surprisingly, a pleasure to think about it. And that’s all you can ask of any artwork.

[1] Wikipedia, 7/11/2025

[2] Prada Marfa was originally commissioned by Ballroom Marfa, a local nonprofit art space.