Music Box Plays Son of a Preacher Man, is Worth Price of Admission by Itself

I just spent a vacation in rocking harvest-time Idaho for my sister’s wedding (see this week’s cover, above), which I’m pretty sure has made me go all crazy with farm-time nostalgia.  So now, you get to look at things like this!  Check it out!

ECAL grad José Ferrufino designed this amazing music box in collaboration with the company Reuge, who evidently makes that sort of thing, and when the music plays the wheat barley goes back and forth gently.  Also?  The song it plays is Son of a Preacher Man by Dusty Springfield!  For some reason!  Sadly there’s no video, but more pics after the jump.

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Cute d.i.y. chair is a “statement” or something, probably

This is kind of adorable:  someone made a mummy Breuer chair using tape.  For some reason it’s called “anti-Breuer” so I’m sure there’s all sorts of “ideas” behind it, but whatevs, it seems to me like the perfect fix for all the ones with broken rattan seats that you can’t throw away, no?

If this doesn’t lift your skirt I don’t know what will

Okay, I know you might have seen this one with the cigarette floating around everywhere, but did you see this one with the skirt lady??  Maybe!  But since you are delighted by it, here it is again.  You’re welcome, everyone.

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Stop whatever you’re doing and go to Uncomfortable Conversations right now

Alert!  From 6-9 pm tonight is the opening reception for Uncomfortable Conversations, a design week offsite show curated by bffs Design Glut featuring some rare No Smarties inhouse design, the Mind the Gap bird-spike gloves you see above.  I’d write more about this, but I’m stuck in Scotland because of the ash cloud (le sigh).  More soon!  Go! Go!

Or read more about the show over at Fast Company.

Uncomfortable Conversations
May 15-18, 2010
10am – 6pm
803 Washington St.
New York, NY

Ceramic Chairs: Sittable?

Los Angeles-based artist Sam Durant commissioned a bunch of these lovely porcelain re-makes of ubiquitous monobloc chairs by craftspeople at the Jiao Zhi studio in Xiamen, China.  In contrast to their millions of plastic counterparts, these are named after the people who made them – so that their identity is never lost:

Utterly functional in terms of its cost-benefit ratio, western standards of taste obviously assign very little aesthetic value to the resin chair. By hand crafting it in porcelain and rendering it as a unique art work the original functionality and following low aesthetic value of the resin chair are brought into comparison with the value added status of the artwork. I titled each of the chairs with its color and the names of all the workers involved in their construction to ensure that this information will never disappear as they circulate in the art world.

Very nice.  Closeups after the jump!

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Taxiyarny? Maybe not.

Wow these anatomically-correct yarn animals by British artist Shauna Richardson are pretty neat.  It’s always nice to see disparate craft traditions mashed up – even if her term “crochetdermy” isn’t exactly the most effortless portmanteau.  You can’t win ‘em all.

One warning:  if, like us, you have had it up to here with the Mounted Deer Heads Made Out of Non-Deer Materials trend, you are going to want to avoid numbers 2, 3, and 4 on her website.  Now that that’s out of the way, go enjoy yourself some yarnmonkeys!  Or see more after the jump.

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Know Arties: Fiona Shaw

My Discomfort Is Evident But I Am Unsure Of The Cause (Prelude To An Unfinished Narrative), 2010

Really dig the work of UK artist Fiona Shaw. We are suckers for text work and chairs in things, and boy howdy does she have both in excess.  Yeah!

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Join the club

You don't view the club chairs, you are viewed BY the club chairs. Or something

French artist Olivier Bardin installed this gaggle of chesterfield club chairs in the Tate Modern for their exhibition, The Fifth Floor:  Ideas Taking Space.  It is (they are?) a performance. What happens is this: you look at the club chairs, then you look at the people in the club chairs, then you become the people in the club chairs, and then other people look at you.  Bam!

Point is, given our affinity for things chesterfield, No Smarties will be moving offices to this room faster than you can say “brandy snifter.”

This just in: more legs!

Little Brown Bat, 2008

Speaking of legs and unsettlingness, have a gander at the delicate and awesome porcelain work of Toronto-based artist Shary Boyle.

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Three words: Fish. Tank. Nunchuks.

Really, what’s not to love about these.  Fishtank Nunchuks by Seattle-based artist Mike Simi.