Thinking Inside the Box

Among the myriad recent trends in design and architecture — from the rage for limited-edition “art furniture” and the proliferation of ambitious museum and condominium buildings — one thing has slipped by with hardly any notice: In the past year or two, a flurry of high-profile museum appointments, especially in the U.S., has been altering the field’s curatorial landscape. This development reflects broader shifts in the way museums are engaging design — how it is being collected, exhibited and, more generally, thought about and discussed.

With their diverse backgrounds and approaches, the new and relocated curators are indicative of a discipline in flux. In some cases, they signal the field’s rising stature, helming new departments — witness R. Craig Miller at the Indianapolis Museum of Art — or building contemporary concentrations within established historical collections, as Zoë Ryan, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Ronald Labaco, at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, are doing. Some are veterans—such as Cara McCarty, who left the St. Louis Art Museum last year to become the curatorial director at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, in New York—while others are relative outsiders, coming from academia (Barry Bergdoll, the chief architecture and design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), journalism (Deyan Sudjic, the director of London’s Design Museum) or commercial galleries (Henry Urbach at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).

Their appointments come at a crucial moment for the field. Many skeptics have become increasingly wary of design’s ongoing dalliance with the art market—say, Marc Newson’s furniture being shown at the Gagosian gallery amid a swirl of rising prices—as well as its flirtation with what some consider gimmickry: How many ironic teacups and clever vases does the world really need? In this environment, the clarifying role of the museum is more important than ever. To be sure, the booming market has presented predictable obstacles to the performance of this role. “It’s certainly made some things very expensive,” says sfmoma’s Urbach, who acquired a mirror-finished Ron Arad A.Y.O.R. (At Your Own Risk) chair for the museum for an undisclosed sum. But it has also provided an opportunity for the institutions to assert a more sober viewpoint. “It’s important to keep trends in perspective,” states Urbach. The Art Institute’s Ryan adds: “The market is not of great interest to us.”

Instead, museums are bringing a renewed focus to design as an agent of social good, as demonstrated in projects as diverse as sustainable architecture and portable water filters for use in the developing world. Meanwhile, new technologies and materials are opening up once unheard-of possibilities in the field just as institutions are discovering of a growing imperative to educate audiences about design and its impact on everything from consumer choices to how people both perceive and organize the world. And as design’s definition and reach continue to expand beyond the familiar terrain of consumer products, the very concept of “object” is becoming both more captivating and more elusive.

“I was laughing about this the other day, but basically, my newest show has hardly any products in it,” says Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s curator of design since 1994. Although Antonelli is not among the new wave of curators, the exhibition she’s referring to, “Design and the Elastic Mind” (through May 12), is a good place to start a conversation about the shift away from things toward ideas. Positioned at the confluence of technology and design, the show presents abstract scientific concepts as they are visualized and translated into understandable and usable forms, whether with nano- and microscopic technology (micron-thin conductors and human-tissue generation), through new modes of grasping the world (mapping programs, sensory devices) or with freehand “sketching” in a motion graphics studio, like that used to create chairs by the Swedish design group Front.