Soft Sell

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.