Style Conscious or Style Conscience?

Style Conscious or Style Conscience?
By Craig Kellogg
Published: April 14, 2008
Today’s question: What is design? Is it a bottle of drinking water that seems ordinary enough at first glance but turns out to be pure Singapore sewage filtered through a revolutionary high-tech membrane so fine that bacteria and any other impurities bigger than water molecules can’t squeeze through? Or is it something exotic and unfamiliar or even willfully decorative that you buy from the likes of Murray Moss?
On a disturbingly warm afternoon this winter, Moss attempts to answer that question. He is perched on a sleek rolling conference-room chair in his spartan office in SoHo, just next door to the rambling design emporium that bears his name. The white walls of the high-ceilinged third-floor space are bare—the better, perhaps, to highlight samples of his merchandise: an opulent new six-foot-six-inch Fornasetti folding screen with gilt solar and lunar motifs on red lacquer ($18,500) and the industrial designer Tom Dixon’s experimental copper-over-Styrofoam CU29 chair, a prototype for the version (edition of eight; price upon request) that was given superstar full-page treatment last fall in the New York Times style magazine.

The store’s atmosphere—that of a carefully curated museum—might discourage some visitors from inquiring about unpublished prices. But that vibe is clearly intentional. In 1994, when Moss opened his industrial-design boutique on Greene Street, he sandwiched it between two art galleries: PaceWildenstein and Metro Pictures. He was betting, he says, that “in a moment of craziness, people would look at my fruit bowls and ashtrays as art.”

That epiphany took a while. America does not have the advanced design culture of a country like Italy, so collectors here had to get comfortable with the idea that design might push the same buttons as paintings and photographs. Over the past five years, Moss says, his customers, many of them art collectors, have started to develop a taste for design that provokes in the way contemporary art does. Manufacturers have responded with exotic surfaces and esoteric materials, such as jet-black Swarovski crystal—and also with futuristic forms. According to Moss, it’s as if they’re saying: “I’m going to make a lot more money if you focus on the shape, Mr. Designer. Go do your thing, please!”

Moss sells Ezri Tarazi’s New Baghdad table, with a welded aluminum top that suggests a map of the Iraqi capital, for $39,500. The store also has an exclusive on the Campana Brothers’ Banquete chair covered with stuffed pandas ($75,000), and it carries Venini’s five-foot-wide black glass Esprit chandelier, which weighs some 800 pounds. Priced at $145,000, it makes Gabriele Magro’s elaborate $9,440 Anthurium tabletop vase seem a steal.

As the market leans toward opulence, some experts seem to be wondering what happened to plain old function. Paola Antonelli, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of design, contrasts “humble masterpieces” such as the century-old Gem paperclip with new objects she calls “overdesigned on purpose.”

“There are camps now,” Moss tells me, explaining that the design community can feel threatened by change and evolving ideas. What makes this an important, if confusing, historical moment for collectors is that some in this field have not enthusiastically embraced the shift away from function. “You have designers whose work is being talked about as art who are screaming at the top of their lungs,” says Moss. In their minds, the luxury market is not king, and they certainly don’t want to be considered courtiers.

It goes without saying that the world outside design stores is not all shiny lacquer and gilt. In fact, a small but growing number of avant-garde designers are looking past the big money offered by collectors to edge their profession off its current pedestal and back toward reality. Is a revolution brewing?

In what can only be described as a rediscovery of progressive ideals, the San Franciscan Yves Behar has designed $100 laptops that are distributed through the nonprofit One Laptop per Child (olpc) program with the goal of getting even the poorest communities online. Last December, the laptops made a surprisingly egalitarian display at the Design Miami fair. “See what happens when some of the finest minds and design talents of our time set out to change the world,” proclaimed Miami’s Luminaire gallery. (On opening night, the assembled design elite couldn’t keep their hands off the functional little machines.)

Behar’s computers are far more noteworthy for their hand-cranked power source than for their green-and-white color scheme. A hallmark of this latest movement is that its proponents typically sidestep the “look at me, I’m priceless” aesthetics of high-end design. Some of them even embrace a kind of design grunge. During the London Design Festival last October, visitors to the Liberty department store viewed “Trash Luxe,” an exhibition of objects made with castoffs and recycled bits by designers such as Majid Asif and Max Lamb. Dealer Paul Johnson, of Johnson Trading Gallery, in New York, had already noted the emergence of this trend, but he reports that the London festival was “the first time I saw it for sale.”

Others hope designers will push recycling further. “We have to think about how we manufacture things,” says Susan Szenasy, the socially conscious editor of Metropolis, the progressive New York–based design magazine. Szenasy adds that design should help reduce environmental impact over the life of products by, for instance, easing disassembly and limiting exposure to toxic components by the workers in India who recycle electronics we send there.

Cynthia E. Smith, a curator at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, in New York, foresees a time when useful objects for the poorest parts of the developing world will begin to influence products sold here. Such rough-and-ready offerings as sugarcane charcoal and a bicycle that carries hundreds of pounds of cargo, included in “Design for the Other 90%,” Smith’s Cooper-Hewitt exhibition last year, underscore the point. “Designers have a unique opportunity to use their skill to provide solutions for 5.8 billion people,” Smith says. “Think about that number.”

For his part, Murray Moss is finished with what he calls phase one. By this he means, essentially, standard-issue modernism. That started with the Bauhaus and flourished through the 1970s—think minimalist Braun countertop appliances and sleek Japanese cutlery—when design existed primarily to solve ordinary problems for the home-furnishings and housewares markets. Until the 1990s, objects with any cultural or intellectual content were rare. Moss believes that the current fascination with designers who use the trappings of art to add value to design and create more exotic wares constitutes phase two, now in full flower. That explains all the Carrara marble used in objects such as Marc Newson’s six-figure chairs and tables and Michael Anastassiades’s $2,800 polished-bronze bowling-ball vases. Moss sees himself offering collectors the deluxe “souvenirs” that might one day be considered emblematic of this perfumed moment in design history.

Which brings us back to that filtered Singapore sewage. The Canadian designer Bruce Mau—who shot to fame in 1995 for his collaboration with Rem Koolhaas on the architect’s book S, M, L, Xl — performs a stunning parlor trick with the bottled water, which he calls a design object. At a press preview a couple of years ago in New York for his big-tent exhibition, “Massive Change,” Mau cracked a bottle open, took a swig and then passed it around to the crowd. There were no takers that afternoon, perhaps more from fear of the designer’s germs than of the sewage.

The “Massive Change” show, which debuted at the Vancouver Art Gallery and then traveled to the mca Chicago, included geneticist Avigdor Cahaner’s featherless broiler chickens, among other ideas. And of course, the drinkable sewage—“that’s phase three,” says Moss, contemplating a future when design will not need the trappings of luxury to prove its worth. As cultural values and the very definition of design evolve, the field will expand. Aspects of what we term design today may even become the basis for new fields as yet unnamed. It was not long ago, after all, when the term design failed to embrace decorative arts.

Kerry Beauchemin, owner of the B4 20th Century Design gallery, in New York, suggests a vintage parable from the small screen to illustrate the way values shift. In the final moments of a 1961 Twilight Zone episode known as the “Rip Van Winkle Caper,” an outlaw time traveler is stumbling through a desert in the future, toting a load of stolen gold bars but no water. The dehydrated man dies as citizens approach him, and they are puzzled by the gold. You see, in the future, precious metals are made in factories.

In our own time, gold has passed from glittering object to mass-market material: You can already buy functionally superior 24-karat-plated Monster cables to hook up a 100-inch flat-screen television. Our factories produce such once-unimaginable luxuries as featherweight iPods and polybags of arugula. Shift the rules a little, and it suddenly seems possible that someone will find customers for Bruce Mau’s designer sewer water after all. Perhaps that person is the one who ushered us into phase two—Murray Moss.

"Style Conscious or Style Conscience?" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.