Steel Screen, Jean Prouvé

Education is the key and Artecase is your guide. Our expertise in the design field, presence at the international fairs, relationships with the galleries and formal experience is how we help inform our clients looking to make design purchases.

The design market is becoming formalized - auction prices sore, design fairs expand, companies like art.sy join in the design dialogue and clients tastes develop. Artecase is here to help clients decipher all of this information and make a confident purchase.

This steel screen by Jean Prouvé in 1959 is available to view now On Art.sy, which has partnered with Design Miami 2012 to showcase the 36 galleries in this years fair and give a preview of more than 450 of the works that will be on view starting Wednesday. You can take a peek now at art.sy at Design Miami.

Collectable Lighting

   

Here are two lamps we love from 1950!  The Grasshopper floor lamp by Greta Magnusson Grossman and the Sputnik ceiling light by Gino Sarfatti.

Last Saturday we attended a Master Class Talk at Design Miami Basel on Collectible Lighting of the 20th and 21st Centuries. The panel included included Didier Krzentowski of Galerie Kreo in Paris, Evan Snyderman of R 20th Century in New York and Marco Romanelli, the Italian designer and critic. Some of their tips on acquiring collectible lighting included:

1. Buy the history or the story of an object rather than basing a decision solely on aesthetics.

2. Understand what an object meant when it was designed - was it revolutionary in its time? If so, that quality makes it collectible.

3. Rarity, of course is important.

4. Buy the best! This might sound obvious but it’s worth stating here… There is a world of difference between a small collection of important examples in lighting design history versus a large amount of lesser items.

5. Do your research and/or seek the advise of an expert.

Kenny Schachter for the Design Miami Blog

Here is a radical plan to enliven the ever and increasingly staid and predictable Basel fair and give the Design Miami/ Basel fair its due—stay with me here: I think the design should be altogether folded and absorbed into the body of the main fair. In fact, Art Basel should go one step further than the Cologne fair that hosted an autonomous NADA fair within the belly of the main event, but still separated; and, in a seamless and nonhierarchical manner, fully integrate the design amongst it’s happy bedfellow, the art.

In another move towards abolishing the dull sameness of big art fairs, the second floor of Art Basel, hosting the more adventurous, less established and canonized art and artists should collapse and mix with its forefathers. We don’t really live or think in a chronological universe where history is simply linear; rather, the future is a non-narrative zone where we bounce between things, with a little more randomness and chaos—don’t fear, fair organizers, give us a little more credit to make our own associations and juxtapositions without spoon-feeding us the identical line, over and over. Call it a dose of creative destruction to cure us from the disease of chronic (fair) fatigue syndrome.

(https://twitter.com/DesignMiamiBlog) 

Design Miami/Basel 2012

Susan surveying the fair from the Fendi booth on the mezzanine.

This lamp!!

Max Ingrand (French, 1908 - 1969), circa 1950.

Kubo, tables sold in pairs by Ramus Fenhann, 2007.

Mathias Bengtsson’s Cellular chair, 2011. Epoxy covered in silver.

Jang Jin

'Craftica', Formafantasma

Wolffish-pig stool: Vegetal tanned pig leather, vegetal tanned wolffish skin, wood, brass label

This is part of a collection called Craftica by Italian designers Formafantasma, which was commissioned by fashion house Fendi and will be presented at the Design Miami/Basel. We can’t wait to see it in a few days!