Hasta La Ideas

At the TEFAF stand of Tornabuoni Arte, Alighero Boetti’s “Mappa del Mundo” (1980), viewed through tulips. (All photos: UnBeige)

Armory Week has come and gone in New Amsterdam, but the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) is just beginning in the Dutch town of Maastricht. Gluttons for masterpieces, we decided to take a field trip. With some 265 exhibiting art and antiques dealers, the 26th edition of the fair opened to the public today after a vernissage that, in the words of a colleague, “makes Art Basel look like a slum”–all savvy lighting, high ceilings, and spacious aisles bursting with tulips, thanks to fair designer Tom Postma.

TEFAF has long been a must for collectors of Old Masters and antiques, and in recent years has boosted its offerings in modern and contemporary art, design, and photography. Were the fair crass enough to have a slogan, it would be “where the museums shop.” We arrived in Maastricht and, fortfied with stroopwafels, set out to see works spanning 6,000 years of history. Let’s just say it’s a good thing that the fair runs through March 24. Here are 25 of our early favorites.

The multilayered stand of Axel Vervoodt. We couldn’t muster the courage to ask him whether he receives a monthly royalty check from Restoration Hardware.

Wartski of London offers (for six figures) the shot that almost killed Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Fired–maybe accidentally, maybe as an assassination attempt–in 1906, the lead pellet was mounted in gold by Carl Fabergé and presented to the tsar as a creepy souvenir.

Among the standouts in the design section of the fair: a 1921 Wiener Werkstatte table lamp by Dagobert Peche (at Bel Etage, Wolfgang Bauer, Vienna) and a preppy combination of works by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (at Galerie Ulrich Fiedler).

Claude Lalanne‘s “Grand Lapin de Victoire” (2001) stands sentry at the Ben Brown Fine Arts stand and keeps an eye on the 1984 Basquiat across the way, at Tornabuoni Arte.

At the stand of Robert Hall, bottles, bottles everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
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Reporting by Colin Murphy

The Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Wentworth Institute of Technology have something no other schools have: two different Industrial Design programs literally across the street from each other. This proximity inspired a unique design competition that would showcase each school’s respective talents. 16 Hours to Glory was a design challenge issued to the students of the schools by a panel of outside judges made up of local professionals. Matt Blunt and Mike McDuffee of 11, Dave Fustino of Bose, Michael Miller of Radius and Evan Hutker of The First Years collaborated to create a brief that would both inspire the students and be feasible in a 16 hour timeframe. Hence, “Room to Improve.”

The brief was framed around Boston’s well known history of being a college town. One thing that all college students have in common is the experience—both good and bad—of living in a dorm room. The brief:

And as college students, one of the things you all have in common is that you’ve lived in a dorm at one point or another. You know what it’s like to share your space with someone you may or may not like. You know the space limitations, the frustrations revolving around storage and food preparation.

You also know that dorm rooms can be fun places, a tiny party in a box. Dorm rooms are your living rooms, your bedrooms, your studios, your kitchens, and where you entertain ourselves.

The challenge you are issued today is based around a ‘standard’ dorm room. It could be on any college campus in city. What you have been tasked with is making the experience of living in a dorm room better.

More than 35 students from three schools rose to the challenge, spending the entire day Saturday working in small teams researching, brainstorming, designing and finalizing their solution. The music was blaring, the pens were flying, the paper piling deep. Many of the teams ventured out to their respective campuses to conduct in-person interviews or ask students about their dorm room experience. As the hours wore on, the 14 teams buckled down to finish by midnight—a tight deadline, but everyone made it!

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Over the years, the Armory Show has shifted its expectations of the year’s commissioned artist from creating a few fresh works to showcase in the catalogue and as benefit editions to “helping to create the visual identity of the fair.” (Fortunately, wildly talented graphic designer Reed Seifer has been there to do the heavy lifting.) And so the selection of performance-inclined Liz Magic Laser as this year’s Armory Show poster artist was cause for eyebrow raising, even before the press release that promised she would “activate the fair’s heritage as a site of innovation and discovery,” a phrase that evoked a portrait of the artist as a young gumshoe, raising an oversized magnifying glass to her eye. Laser went the inside baseball route (hey, it worked for Argo) and hit a home run. Embracing the sleek corporate efficiency of the megafair, she embarked on an market research odyssey, staging a series of focus groups composed of collectors, curators, art pros, and journalists, to help her strategize what she would create for the fair, from limited-edition works to tote bags. Watch and enjoy:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Designers and thinkers alike are invited to join the Seattle creative community for an evening of, well, thinking about design. Tomorrow night, join panelists Jon Winebrenner (partner of OneOak Design and longtime friend-of-Core), Karyn Zuidinga (Analytic Design Group), Alysha Napes (TEAGUE) and Carl Ledbetter (Microsoft Xbox) for a film screening and subsequent discussion and reception at the Seattle Art Museum:

Produced by One Time Studio in San Francisco, ‘Design & Thinking‘ was funded via a successful Kickstarter campaign and features interviews with a some of the world’s best design minds—including laptop inventor and IDEO cofounder Bill Moggridge; Smart Design cofounder Dan Formosa; and AIGA CEO Richard Grefe. One Time Studio’s Yang Yu Hsiu says: “From our point of view, design thinking did a good job of bringing forward the value of design to address changes in the world. There have been many backlashes over the topic recently. We want to introduce many voices by form of documentary to look at the topic neutrally. It is important for people to know both the good and bad of design thinking, at the same time.”

View this new documentary and then engage with our panelists and your peers as we further explore this fascinating topic and how its impact is being felt in Seattle, Vancouver, and beyond.

Check out the ‘Design & Thinking’ Eventbrite page for tickets more information.

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Barry Bergdoll, come on down! You’re the next Andrew W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts! This spring, MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design will present a series of six lectures entitled “Out of Site in Plain View: A History of Exhibiting Architecture since 1750.” Over a series of Sunday afternoons (see full schedule below) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Bergdoll will delve into topics such as “Architecture in Public from the Salon to the French Revolution,” “Exhibitions between Reform and Avant-Garde,” and the big finish, “Architecture and the Rise of the Event Economy,” with each lecture introducing “a new capacity for architecture itself, made possible through the culture of architectural exhibition.” Bergdoll is the 62nd scholar to deliver the Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, established in 1949 and named for the founder of the National Gallery. Past lecturers include T. J. Clark, Helen Vendler, and Kirk Varnedoe, whose lectures are available as podcasts.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.