Smells like Luxury from the collection of TAG Gallery

Smells like Luxury

Digital Collage and New Media on Acrylic; Augmented Reality

30 x 30 x 1.5 in (76.2 x 76.2 x 3.81 cm)

$3,000

Available

Smells Like Luxury presents a bright, neon perfume bottle rendered with the visual seduction of high-end branding, yet its contents replace aspiration with decay. Suspended inside the vessel are a skeleton, worms, and exposed brains, an anatomical inventory that turns the promise of refinement into a memento mori. The bottle becomes a sealed display case, suggesting that luxury is often less a substance than a spectacle: a glowing container designed to make mortality feel distant, controllable, and purchasable.

The neon intensity evokes retail lighting and digital advertising, where desire is engineered through saturation and shine. Against that polished surface, the interior reads as abject and undeniably physical. Worms signal consumption from within, the slow work of time that no fragrance can mask. The brains introduce cognition and complicity, implying that the fantasy of luxury is not accidental but learned, internalized, and maintained through cultural scripts that equate beauty with value.

By literalizing what the bottle cannot admit, Smells Like Luxury asks what is being covered, deodorized, or aestheticized in the pursuit of status. It frames luxury as a kind of embalming practice: an attempt to preserve identity through objects, even as the body insists on its limits. The work offers a critique of commodified desire, where the scent of prestige is sold as transcendence, and the evidence of impermanence is kept hidden behind glass.

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From TAG Gallery

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About the artist

Austin Lubetkin

b. 1996

Austin Lubetkin is a visual artist and software engineer whose work is shaped by his experiences of autism and synesthesia. He sees language, sound, and emotion as colors and patterns, and translates this sensory crossover into bold, graphic compositions. Using the visual language of advertising, social media, and luxury branding, his work explores how identity, beauty, and neurodivergence are packaged, judged, and sold. Lubetkin is a member of the international artists association. Lubetkin's work has been exhibited at galleries and museums across the United States including recent exhibits at the Sasse Museum and Awita Gallery and in international exhibitions at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art and Red Dot in Basel, Switzerland. He has also served as both curator and featured artist for an exhibition at the Orlando Science Center, focusing on the intersection of technology and perception. In May 2026, Lubetkin will be curating a group show exploring the experiences of artists with autism at TAG Gallery

Additional Details

Additional Artworks

Earth:Reclaimation

THE BEACH - FOR WATER IN SKY GALLERY

Outlet #2

Hummers

Moda

Bear Me Into Freedom

Cesárea

Origami Art

About the artist

Austin Lubetkin