Art
Design Art London
Art
It’s a mark of how permeable the boundaries between art and design have become of late, that during London’s annual art festival this year the big talking point has been a selling design exhibition. The brainchild of Paris’s Societe d’Organisation Culturelle, Patrick Perrin, Design Art London was conceived in direct response to the growing interest in viewing, buying and selling pieces of design as art.
‘I wanted to elicit debate around where one discipline ends and another begins,’ Perrin explained, ‘and if the two really can be separated these days, when you have pieces of design selling at auction for record-breaking prices.’ So he gathered twenty of the world’s greatest design galleries to display their favourite pieces in London’s Hanover Square.
Each of the twenty galleries specialises in a specific time period or style and consequently the exhibition provides a comprehensive chronological survey of the design art market’s evolution. It traces the history from post-war prototypes by Le Corbusier and Jean Prouve to contemporary designs by Zaha Hadid and Ron Arad right up to recent discoveries like Max Lamb and Atelier van Lieshout.
Click here to see a selection of the designs from the 20 participating galleries.
What’s remarkable is to see how factors over time have shaped the way we view different eras and individual pieces of design. The conclusion one reaches is that it’s very much more than age, fame and the relative collectibility of a designer that bestows a product with design art status as opposed to simply design.
And Perrin is keen to give his own take on the design art debate: ‘What sets every piece in this exhibition apart from what you might see in a design fair is that nothing here is mass-manufactured: prototypes and one-off pieces have an inherent value beyond a product that’s one of 1000, made by a machine in a short space of time.’
INFORMATION
- Event dates
- 12 October 2007 to 14 October 2007
- Website
- http://www.designartlondon.com
- Address
- Design Art
Hanover Square
London W1
