Design Miami
2007 (2006 coverage below)
Design Miami loses its heat
By Janet Eastman
December 13, 2007
LAST year at Design Miami, the premier U.S. showcase for rare vintage and limited-edition furniture-as-art pieces, the buzz was about a $2.5-million Marc Newson chaise longue and freewheeling hedge-fund Wunderkinder snapping up anything associated with a known designer. This year? As Gerard O’Brien of Reform Gallery in Los Angeles reported the second day of the show, after the parade of private collectors had subsided: “Lots of hugs, no kisses.”
The four-day show that wrapped Sunday ran in conjunction with the nation’s top contemporary art show, Art Basel Miami Beach. And, indeed, the quality of the furnishings was enough to have museum curators purring descriptions into their cellphones with hope that trustees would spring for a 1959 Jean Royere straw marquetry table, a 1955 hand-carved polychrome Paul Laszlo console or a new Pierre Charpin signed-and-numbered coffee table covered in blue Bisazza mosaics.
But the frenzied buying that many have come to expect at Design Miami never materialized for some exhibitors. Was the downturn in the economy to blame? Have rising auction prices for collectible furniture led to unrealistic expectations here? Was there too much competition from what’s snidely called “artmageddon,” the two dozen other art and design shows, showroom events and museum exhibits within a five-mile radius? Or is the market just beginning to see how few people are willing to spring for a $450,000 Jean Prouve vault ladder?
According to exhibitors and visitors alike, all were possibilities. They couldn’t blame attendance, which at 20,000 was about the same as last year. Michael Ovitz trudged up stairs to the fourth floor of the Moore Building to meet the show’s designer of the year, Tokujin Yoshioka, but afterward a publicist quietly declared, “He didn’t buy anything.”
Neither did Jane Adlin, a curator with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Of the 26 galleries selected for the show, she lingered over the offerings brought by Donzella 20th Century of New York and Galerie Kreo and Galerie Patrick Seguin, both from Paris. But …
“I didn’t see a ‘must have’ for our collection,” she said Monday after returning to New York. She also noticed a drop in the pace. “I found this year less interesting than last, not sure why. Seemed like less energy.”
The crowd, said Kenny Schachter of RoveProjects LLP in London, was “more seasoned, more measured.” He sold one of 12 boomerang-shaped Belu benches by Zaha Hadid Architects for $200,000 to a private collector. A stainless-steel Big Rock by Arik Levy is on hold for $125,000.
For many who consider themselves connoisseurs rather than impulse buyers, the cool-down in Miami was welcomed. Christiane Fischer, chief executive of AXA Art Insurance, said her clients were in a better position to take their time this year and negotiate on price.
A rare exception to all the measured buying seemed to come from Design Miami’s founder, Craig Robins. The developer and art collector announced during the show that he sold a part of Design Miami to the organizers of Art Basel, further gluing furniture to the art world.
Robins picked up pieces as if filling a cart at Costco. He acquired a wood-and-metal cabinet by Aranda/Lasch, the Fractual Cloud light sculpture by Levy and chairs by Yoshioka, Max Lamb and Pierre Paulin. He also bought from lesser-known designers, who were brought in to create hand-turned paper vases, a drop chandelier made from plastic water containers and other works on the spot.
For all the talk about six-figure deals, it was refreshing to find designers so accessible to the average show-goer. Tom Dixon stood underneath an Artek pavilion made from scraps of self-adhesive labels, explaining the thought behind the lighting overhead. Next door, Mike Meire unveiled his concept for a kitchen: a compact, sheltered farm with fresh herbs growing next to the Dornbracht gooseneck faucet, an aquarium with red snapper swimming about and a pen in the corner for squealing pigs. “A kitchen shouldn’t be a showroom but a place where life takes place,” he said.
The Corning Museum of Glass set up a mobile studio where the Campana Bros. and other artists directed glass to be heated, stretched and cooled into shape. Said artist Paul Haigh after a hot shift, “We are such consumers of end products that people are now becoming more interested in the process. It connects us to the material.”
“The art is the process,” said Murray Moss of the Moss showrooms in Los Angeles and New York. “The piece is just the souvenir.” At Design Miami, Moss sold two of five editions of a suite of cast-bronze pieces called Robber Baron: Tales of Power, Corruption, Art and Industry. Imagined as functional objects in a robber baron’s residence, the set by Studio Job of Belgium – a safe, cabinet, table, mantel clock and lamp set on bases that look like blackened factories – is priced at more than $1.1 million.
Evan Snyderman of R 20th Century in New York has exhibited all three years Design Miami has been staged. This time, he introduced new productions of furniture by Oscar Niemeyer. The Brazilian architect, who turns 100 on Saturday, has only had his furniture produced in very limited numbers. One 13-piece set sold to a contemporary art dealer from Zurich. The sale of another set is pending, reportedly for $200,000.
“The show in general had a different feel, less of a frenzy,” Snyderman said Monday. “And that is a positive thing.”
Snyderman also sold rare pieces by Brazilian Joaquim Tenreiro, including two 1954 tree trunk benches, a 1950 glass-top coffee table, a pau marfim wood coffee table from the 1940s and a three-legged 1947 chair striped in five hardwoods. A 1969 Tenreiro bar with diamond-cut jacaranda went to a Miami collector. “I cannot reveal sale prices,” he said, “but they were strong.”
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STILL, an exhibitor who asked not to be named said that even the best furniture shows are having a harder time because auction houses have successfully cataloged contemporary furniture as art, and they “have created glamorous, see-and-be-seen events with trophies for the super rich.”
Geoff Diner, who owns a gallery in Washington, D.C., displayed a rare wrought-iron and palissander Pierre Chareau desk and stool from 1927 that was exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in 1993. A New York museum and the wife of a private collector were interested, but at the close of the show, the piece was still available at a six-figure price, which he declined to divulge.
Diner, who opened his gallery in 1975 specializing in pre-World War II pieces, said the market has changed.
“The rapid evolution of the business catalyzed by the incredible prices generated at auctions make it more difficult for dealers to attain things privately,” he said. “In the pre-electronic age, the business was less frenetic and transactions could be done quietly and discreetly. Today, people have their BlackBerries wired to their bed frames and everything is reported in a nanosecond.”
Is something valued less if it isn’t snapped up in a flash like holiday trimmings the day after Christmas?
First-time exhibitor O’Brien doesn’t think so.
In the last hour of the show, he sold a table by California woodworker J.B. Blunk for $250,000. The next day, when he was packing up his stand, he sold a Blunk sculptural arch to the same buyer for another $250,000, setting a record for Blunk’s work.
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2006 Show
FANTASTIC CHAIR — JUST DON'T SIT ON IT
Furniture (even the aluminum sofa) cements its status as modern art at the country's hottest show.
By Janet Eastman
MIAMI — WHEN Design Miami — one of several side shows that takes place during the annual art exhibition extravaganza, Art Basel — folded up its tent on Sunday, attendees were still talking about the $2.5-million lounge chair.
Forget all the hullabaloo associated with these four days of aesthetic mayhem, branded by some as Baselmania. Forget the all-night parties, the electronic music and the mango martinis. Forget the celebrity sightings, the 40,000 visitors, the performance and the hunger artists alike. All that's old school. Now in its fifth year, Art Basel Miami Beach can do little to surprise, but Design Miami, in its second year, is just starting to gather momentum.
Which is of course why they could ask the same price for a lounge chair as for a David Hockney. Sure, it looks like an oversized clown's shoe with rivets and is, in the designer's own words, "not even comfortable." This was, after all, the lounge that launched a thousand knockoffs, the prototype of the famed Lockheed Lounge, Marc Newson's masterpiece from 1986 that caught the eye of Philippe Starck and ignited the design world.
And there it was, up for grabs and nicely positioned on a pedestal as the centerpiece of New York gallery Sebastian + Barquet's space in the Moore Building in Miami's Design District. And if $2.5 million seems high, don't forget that a collector paid $1 million at auction for it last summer. But to focus on the cost of this Winged Victory is to miss the point of this year's show. If Design Miami had anything to prove, it was the ascendancy of furniture as "art." Which only makes sense seeing how Design Miami rides the coattails of Art Basel — and, to some extent, vice versa.
Show director Ambra Medda, 25, played to this synergy when putting together Design Miami. Although she received hundreds of inquiries, she selected only 19 galleries to showcase their best one-off or limited-edition vintage and new furnishings.
"What we did is frame design in a way to make it understandable to the art world," says Medda, who came to believe that people of her generation weren't being served by other furniture fairs.
Newson is the perfect shaggy-haired poster child for her vision. The 43-year-old Australian was named designer of the year by Design Miami precisely because he represents the new ideal: creating furniture that carries a value like fine art. But he was not alone.
Throughout Design Miami's three-day run, more than 20,000 of the design-minded public wandered past pricy ceramic totems assembled in 1964 by Ettore Sottsass, a '70s three-tiered pink Fireball Lamp by Verner Panton and a 2004 couch, silk screened with newspapers, by Mattia Bonetti.
In addition to the Lockheed Lounge, Sebastian + Barquet had a coffee table that George Nakashima carved from buckeye burl and walnut in 1981 and four enameled chairs Jean Prouvé designed for Électricité de France's headquarters in 1950. Across the back wall of the space were 8 1/2 -foot-high solid rosewood panels from the early '70s that are sequentially numbered to match the grain. On the first day of the show, a woman and her interior designer rolled out floor plans on top of a rare Max Ingrand stainless-steel desk to see if the panels would fit in the den of her Manhattan penthouse. They would and she dropped $150,000 for all 80 linear feet.
Singer Beyoncé, rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West, and actors Keanu Reeves and Mandy Moore were there. So too were longtime contemporary art collectors, from billionaire Eli Broad to comedian Steve Martin. Even Martha Stewart came for a peek. And while Paul Schimmel, chief curator of Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, organized a trip for a few dozen museum supporters to attend the Art Basel show, he knew that some in the group would cross the bay to see the furniture show.
Galleries paid $25,000 to $40,000 to exhibit at the show, Medda says. Zesty Meyers of R 20th Century in New York believes it's worth the expense to reach high-spending collectors, museum curators and dealers. "If they will fly to Miami and like what they see, they will fly to New York to see our gallery," he says.
The hunt for fine furniture is only going to get stronger, says Amy Lau, a New York-based interior designer and design curator who worked with Medda to start Design Miami last year.
"Furniture is no longer aesthetics' stepchild," she says. Those who come to this balmy city are looking for art, she says, whether it's on the wall or something to sit in; an old piece by an established name or a design by someone who may be the next Newson.
The gallery offerings were approved by a vetting committee that Lau headed along with Alexander von Vegesack, director of the Vitra Design Museum in Germany. This year, galleries were encouraged to bring more works by emerging artists, and the committee sought out pieces from Latin America. Espasso, a Brazilian firm with a showroom in Los Angeles, was invited to exhibit benches, chairs and tables by Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa and Lina Bo Bardi.
Lau says that limited-edition mirrored tables by Ron Arad sold so quickly in Barry Friedman's space last year that it instigated a pricing structure used for art prints and photographs: As the pieces sell in the series, the price goes up. Wendell Castle's new black plastic dining table, one of only eight, was tagged at $37,000 "at this moment," qualified an R 20th Century salesperson on the second day of the show.
Although it's hard to predict its impact, Design Miami's success means more art galleries will be giving contemporary furniture the white-glove treatment. (In January, one of the most prestigious art galleries, Gagosian Gallery in New York, Beverly Hills and London, will unveil Newson's new marble chairs, tables and wall shelves.) Lau hopes the show will also make pieces by South Americans more available. Gallery owner Meyers thinks it proves that the American studio craftsman Castle, at 74, is hot property again since his work was shown in several spaces, including his own and New York-based Phurniture's.
Some of the experimental processes and materials here, such as Shlomo Harush's $60,000 crumpled aluminum sofa and love seat that were made for this show, may influence furniture down the line. And perhaps some new designer's prototype will sell in the future for $2.5 million.
There's a chance. A prototype of a clear resin chaise longue created from General Motors' software by 27-year-old Joris Laarman of Holland sold the first day of the show for nearly $50,000 (35,000 euros, to be exact) at Barry Friedman's space adjacent to the main hall. The unexpected sale, Laarman says, ensures that 20 more of his complicated design will be made.
"He's lucky," says Newson after hearing of Laarman's sale. Lucky to sell his chair or to be young and successful when the market is looking for new stars? At Design Miami, it was hard to tell. As of press time, no one had ponied up the $2.5 million.