April 2008 From the Editor

Known as much for her personal flair as for her extraordinary eye, Lam is also a provocateur whose gallery, tellingly called Contrasts, has pushed people to think about not just the distance separating East and West, past and present—and, yes, design and fine art—but also the bridges connecting each of these concepts with its apparent opposite.

In essence, that’s what we’ve set out to accomplish with this, our biggest design issue ever. Given the extraordinary growth of interest in the market for decorative objects of every stripe, shape, size, medium and political bent, the primary question we’ve attempted to answer on these lush, image-filled pages is not “What is art?” but “What is design?”

We’ve tackled this Herculean task in part by creating our first-ever Ten to Watch list. We shine the spotlight on the remarkable men and women whose contributions to design have dramatically changed how we look at the world—and, more important, how we will come to view things going forward.

How did we find them? First, we asked some of the finest design minds around—people who have been on many lists themselves—for ideas. We weren’t looking for upstarts or neophytes but for people whose futures promise to be as bright as their pasts. Then we ruthlessly winnowed out those who didn’t really wow us (not wholly unlike the way Jerry Helling goes about his ICFF Studio talent scouting).

The ones who made the final list are forces to be reckoned with. We celebrate Lam not just for her trailblazing efforts as a design retailer but also for her compelling new line of furniture produced under the XYZ rubric.

Then there’s Wendell Castle, who has spent more than four decades experimenting with organic forms and yet shows no sign of running out of fresh ideas—or pencils with which to bring them to life. (In December at Design Miami, where his vintage works and his new pieces were met with equal enthusiasm, he told me that he’s one of the remaining few who still design everything by hand, and close observers of his portrait will notice that the sole high-tech tool in his studio is an electric pencil sharpener.)

Also among our Ten to Watch is 31-year-old Zoë Ryan. With stints at New York’s MoMA and the Van Alen Institute under her belt, she was named the first-ever design curator at the venerable Art Institute of Chicago. Ryan figures, too, in Aric Chen’s “Thinking Inside the Box.” That story looks at how a new crop of curators is redefining what’s worthy of display (sometimes the “what” is not even an object). Their fresh approach comes at an opportune time, Chen says, when “the clarifying role of the museum is more important than ever.”

It’s indicative of today’s bursting boundaries that Ryan’s just-opened inaugural show in Chicago is devoted to Graphic Thought Facility, a London-based outfit admired for its print and digital graphics as well as for its designs for books, products and museum exhibitions. These disparate arenas are evidence, according to the museum’s promotional literature, of “the firm’s versatility in bringing its practice from page to space.”

In celebration of such versatility, the issue you hold in your hands ambitiously brings together in its pages the design world’s foremost forward thinkers and visionary makers of space—and the glorious objects that enliven that space.  

"From the Editor" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.