The act of deciphering the sensuous language of retail display is always already nostalgic. Walter Benjamin realized as much when, in the 1930s, he spent years trying to uncover the hidden meanings of the shopping arcades of nineteenth-century Paris. Gabriele Beveridge and Marge Monko study this process with deep sensitivity, each in her own way, and, like Benjamin, without denying its lingering magic of desire. Yet, exactly because of the accord between their aesthetic missions, their works when exhibited together allowed the viewer to be seduced too uncritically by the very surfaces the artists