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The store’s atmosphere—that of a carefully curated museum—might discourage some visitors from inquiring about unpublished prices.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.)