The Art Amusement Park Luna Luna Will Either Make You Laugh or Cry

As I enter the Shed, ready to be “immersed” in the “fun” that is Luna Luna, the ’80s art-amusement-park recently restored by Drake for $100 million, I hear a music blaring. I turn. I see a man on a motorcycle. And from his stereo, the infamous line: Tryna strike a chord, and it’s probably A minorrr.

I take it that the Man on a Motorcycle blasting song-of-the-summer “Not Like Us”, Kendrick Lamar’s now iconic Drake diss, will not pay $44 to go see Luna Luna tonight. We’re not like him. As with seemingly everyone in Brooklyn with a car or a stereo this summer, when the feud was at its peak, he’s sided with Kendrick—for free. The Man speeds away from me. Money burns before me. I go inside.

Luna Luna was once outside. Viennese pop star and artist André Heller staged his phantasmagoric carnival in the middle of a green field in Hamburg, West Germany, for one (rainy) summer, 1987. Here, with half a million dollars from the German magazine Neue Revue, Heller concocted a crazed idea: an amusement park (or “luna park,” as they’re called outside the US—hence, “Luna Luna”) with rides designed by the biggest visual artists of the day. Caricaturist Manfred Deix crated a Palace of the Winds, a theater with “live performances of amplified farting accompanied by classical violin.” Kenny Scharf customized a Victorian swing ride from the 1930s. A dying Salvador Dalí made a Dalídom, a geodesic dome with mirrors that create a lazy infinity effect. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the year before he died, designed a giant Ferris wheel, scored to Miles Davis’ “Tutu” (1986), festooned with his drawings (a roasted chicken on a spit, naked torsos, saxophonists) and texts (“JIM CROW©” and “THE END”). At Rebecca Horn’s Love Thermometer, couples wrap their hands around the glass bottom and watch the heated red liquid move up from “solitude,” “awareness,” “image,” to “truth,” “madness,” “damage.” Keith Haring built a carousel out of his funky, dancin’ lil’ guys, as well as a moon drawing with two lines of text that could serve as the official Luna Luna tagline: _{LUNA LUNA IN THE SKY./ WILL YOU MAKE ME LAUGH OR CRY?}

I read Heller’s quote on the wall: “Art should come in unconventional guises and be brought to those who might not ordinary seek it out in more predictable settings.” A Haring quote in the press release is more to the point: “Art is nothing if you don’t reach every segment of the people.” Sounds lovely. And it was: we’re teased with photos of kids and adults having fun that Hamburg Summer of ’87. (It ominously foreshadows the neoliberal world order on the horizon ushered in by the falling Berlin Wall, but that’s another story.)

Alas, Luna Luna, in its current Shed iteration as “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” doesn’t make merry. In 1987, Luna Luna charged 20 Deutschemarks, or $22, and kids got in for free on weekdays. Now, at the lowest end of a tiered system, it’s $44 for admittance, $35 for kids. A single hitch: you can’t ride any of the damn rides.

“Forgotten Fantasy” is a queasy mix of “nots.” It’s not an immersive experience, except for the colorful if unexciting installations by Lichtenstein, Dalí, and David Hockney. It’s not a museum show, as carnies, elephants, and other deranged puppets stagger in and out of the biggest room like angry lost souls. And it’s definitely not a luna park anymore. It’s geared less for kids and more for bourgeois adults and their kids “in the know.”

About the tier system. It was in place in L.A.’s Boyle Heights last December, where, for $94 and a “Moon Pass,” you could enter the Dalí and the Hockney, with a slew of caveats. The Hockney is underwhelming: a cavernous empty space, like a fake Brothers Grimm forest imagined by Lars von Trier, a bunch of glitchy strobe lights, and (I don’t know if this was part of the immersion) some guy on the other end of the room, dressed in plain clothes, mirroring my every step. Ominous.

The Dalí isn’t worth much, not unless you get a kick out of taking your selfie in a room of mirrors, five of you at a time. Here in New York, a different segregating tier system is in place. A $94 “Moon Pass” will here get you expedited entry, instant access to the “immersive installations,” and discounts on the pricey merch. A $241 Super Moon Pass will get you all of that, plus instant access whenever you want—victory for the ruling, but still not riding, class. With the tiers, you won’t have to stand in the long line with the working-class waiters in order to walk into the Roy Lichtenstein house and its maze of glass—which, in a real two-for-one deal, kicked up my claustrophobia and agoraphobia in one fell swoop.

Maybe the biggest draw is the “Wedding Chapel,” designed by Luna Luna mastermind Helller. Here, you can marry anyone you want in a public ceremony—your crush, your best friend, your partner, a rando/future-spouse who bought the Super Moon Pass. In 1987 Hamburg, owners married their dogs. A photographer once married his camera. Writer William Poundstone observed, “Most of the marriages I witnessed were between fathers and their daughters.” A Polaroid of the happy couple is taken, and pasted onto a Luna Luna© wedding certificate; to divorce, the yellow paper instructs, you can simply rip up the picture. The “priest” and his “assistant” were aggressively pushing the divorce option on everyone.

In the most perverse but best gesture of the entire carnival, the Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys, who around this time wrote the hit song “Sun Instead of Reagan,” contributed a note. Not a ride, not a candied-apple stand, not even a urinal cake, but a grimly serious, barely legible, scribbly handwritten text near the entrance. Its title: “Text on Capital and Creativity.” I’m told by my German-speaking friend Léa that the text features such gems as “Money is not capital at all. However, ability is capital.” And “I am not a Marxist, but I probably love Marx more than many Marxists who just believe in him.” Imagine the shock of the kids coming out of the farting theater to this one.

As I leave Luna Luna and walk towards the subway, I look up. Will I laugh or will I cry? I notice twinkling in the sky. It’s neither the moon nor the stars; it’s the Christmas lights on the Vessel. It has just reopened after four years. New suicide safety barriers have been installed from bottom to top. People get to ride it again.