Hasta La Ideas

Whether you’re looking to wow your Valentine, wish yourself a happy Chinese New Year, or find the perfect birthday gift for Mayor Bloomberg (who turns 70 on Thursday), we present ten lovely ways to do so:

1. MZ Wallace Valentine’s Day Hamish pouch and card ($35, available from MZ Wallace). It’s impossible to go wrong with a gift from MZ Wallace–particularly when the NYC-based company is in collaboration mode. This cheerful coated linen pouch comes with a valentine printed by the letterpress wizards at Swayspace.

2. Framed John Rawlings print ($139, available from One Kings Lane). Skip the perishable blooms in favor of this enduringly rosy vision by Rawlings, whose haunting brand of glamour has aged remarkably well. Plucked from the Condé Nast archive, the photo originally appeared in the June 1952 issue of House & Garden.

3. Keith Haring iPhone 5 Case ($35, available from Urban Outfitters). Shield your Valentine from heartbreak–or at least a shattered smartphone–with the help of a Haring illustration.

4. Julia Chiang’s “Because of You” edition for The Standard ($300, available from The Standard). Get a piece of Brooklyn-based artist Chiang, whose handmade ceramic links are stamped “Because of You” along with her initials, date, and edition number.

5. Lisa Black Butterfly Dome ($288, available from Fab). “Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man,” said novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov. You’re halfway there with Black’s pair of Ulysses butterfly specimens.

6. The Missing Ink by Phillip Hensher (published by Faber & Faber). Do you know what the handwriting of your closest friends looks like? Hensher considers this endangered art.

7. Vintage pencils from Italy ($28 per packet of five, available from Terrain). Ready to preserve handwriting? Stock up on utensils with personality. We like these 1940s pencils, found amdist a cache of vintage art supplies in Rome’s Antica Cartotecnica stationery shop.

8. Robert Longo skateboard ($975, available from AHALife). Who wouldn’t fall for the Sk8room’s signed, limited edition plywood skateboard silkscreened with Longo’s “Eric”? And 20% of the proceeds go to Skateistan, a non-profit organization for kids.
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In 1977, all of the special people spent Halloween night at Studio 54 to celebrate Liza Minnelli‘s buzzy Broadway turn in The Act. Oscar Abolafia snapped this photo of a group of post-show revelers that included Andy Warhol (clutching a Playbill), Diana Vreeland, and Steve Rubell. The following year, Vreeland, then in the Costume Institute phase of her legendary career, joined Rubell to celebrate his 35th birthday and followed up with a thank you note that rather mysteriously enthused about his “adorable children.” The note and photo are among the Studio 54 memorabilia that will be auctioned tomorrow by Palm Beach Modern Auctions. In addition to photos from Rubell’s personal collection (including some Warhol Polaroids and the artist’s bronze dollar sign sculpture, estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000), there are V.I.P. drink tickets, party invitations, and a guestbook from the famed nightclub. The auction house has also studded the sale with some glam design pieces by the likes of Paul Evans, Vladimir Kagan, and Milo Baughman, whose sleek 1970s sectional comes with a revolving cocktail table: drink up and boogie down.

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The Whitney’s Wade Guyton exhibition is both buzzed-about and delicious, but you can’t drizzle it over biscuits (trust us, we’ve tried!). The museum is on the case with its very own honey, harvested from–what we imagine to be Brutalist–beehives located on the roof of its Marcel Breuer-designed building. The museum’s amateur urban apiarists, in collaboration with the local honey gurus at Let it Bee, have been at it since the summer of 2011, but this is the first time they had enough to make it available for sale. An eight-ounce jar will set you back $19 ($15.20 for Whitney members), a small price to pay for not only “museum-quality” honey but also the work of Kiki Smith: Whitney director Adam Weinberg commissioned the artist to design the charming label that adorns each fetchingly hexagonal jar. Purchase yours now here. Once the 2012 jars are gone, the museum will take reservations for its 2013 crop. No word as to whether the hives will make the move to the Whitney’s new Renzo Piano-designed downtown digs come 2015.

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‘Tis the season for pop-up emporiums and “best of” lists. Wired combines the two with a concept store stocked with the magazine’s picks for the most innovative products and technologies of the year. To get its annual NYC retail showcase to look as good as the covetable merchandise–think GPS Navigation Shoes, a stool made of recycled bicycle inner tubes, and a Makerbot desktop 3D printer–Wired tapped Mother New York to mastermind the shopping experience. The creative agency delivered a sleek space filled with custom furniture and fixtures as well as wall-sized interactive elements. The store design is unified by graphics inspired by the magazine’s “What’s Inside” features and the work of product-dissecting photographer Todd McClellan, Mother creative director Piers North tells us. Pay a virtual visit to the store, which is open Tuesday through Sunday ’til December 24, by scrolling through the below photos. This being a Wired production, the stuff–who doesn’t need a pair of caped Superman socks?–is also available to purchase online.

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Diller Scofidio + Renfro excels at inversion, masterly flipping concepts of public and private, nature and structure (see also: High Line, The). The interdisciplinary design studio’s transformation of New York’s Lincoln Center is revealed in the pages of Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account, hot off the Damiani presses. Falling somewhere on the continuum between art book and architectural diary, the monograph chronicles the extensive redevelopment project through photographs, drawings, renderings, texts, and interviews. Upping the book’s giftability quotient are the series of 30 gatefolds: large-format photographs by the likes of Iwan Baan and Matthew Monteith that open up to stories and ephemera documenting the spaces shown in the images.

In Miami? So are Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro. The trio will be signing books today at Design Miami from 1-2 p.m. before heading across the street to chat with Ari Wiseman, deputy director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, as part of the Art Salon series at Art Basel Miami Beach.

This is part of a series of elegantly wrapped December posts about desirable goods that we suggest you purchase with the laudable yet vague intent of giving to others and then keep for yourself. Got a “nifty, gifty” idea? Tell the UnBeige elves: unbeige (at) mediabistro.com

Previously on UnBeige:
• Nifty, Gifty: Rodarte’s Out-of-This-World Ornament

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.