Obs. 113: Sick-ass grails this week

Value begets value

Good evening. David Lynch’s items are on auction, going up in a week and change on Julien’s. I myself am looking at his Keurig machine. I haven’t had a bad cup of coffee in weeks. A bigger post is in the work but here is the lot to glaze over. There are some deals in there. Legit. More later. Anyways I bet Bruce Willis wins half the cool crap here.

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Obs 113

Inno Finland Pipeline chairs, Ct.: I love that they named a chair after the legendary Newark nightclub… actually more truly the design itself’s about as miraculous, there is no designer for the particular chair and the co. is a bit obscure (by mainstream metrics)… Inno is a Finnish design company from ‘75 that laces out poppier, post MCM items (lots of plastic, a light touch, super refreshing), a selection of which can be found here… the non-leather stuff is the best. Finnish design in a very rough sense is a bridge tradition, with the pieces that make its way onto auction sites here halfway between the 60s/70s design traditions of Italy and France. I thought it was just Yrjo Kukkapuro’s work that fit into this aesthetic—circular and near campy/exciting on one hand, like Italian furniture, and filtered through a tamped down and restrained maturity here, like it’s French. But it’s not. These could be those. Just another nails no-designer piece from decades ago. These haven’t sold on LA before, and there’s a chair very far from this on 1stDibs… but these ones are $100

• The Inno sticks out from this auction which otherwise has a lot of good teak and wood (this rosewood bookshelf is amazing and at $50). The best items I found are below the jump.

Lilyriver Finland chair, Fl.: Another Finnish chair! that kind of shreds the above theory… thing is flat, and looks deeply 1930s with a debt to the Bauhaus… not very Mediterranean. Hard to find info here… searching around it says it’s by Lilyriver, a Finnish design company founded by Pentti Hakala, himself a Finnish designer (he did this cool steel coatrack) who worked at Inno… all a tangled web. Lilyriver was responsible for the Lily 115 (looks like this, 500 made, L-shaped legs) and the Lily 80, the former of which received an Design Forum Finland award. The above chair isn’t very Italian, sure, but then neither is this one:

midcenturycollective

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and it was designed by Piero Lissoni… who was Italian. What’s a border? No price history on these; it’s part of an excellent auction whose best items sit at the midpoint of canon and access, and are listed out below the jump. $50

Robert Erickson birdseye office chair, Atlanta: No words on this… I would describe this… monstrosity? masterpiece? as the exact type of item I look for when I trawl through auctions. It is one of a kind… it is a mistake… it is free… it is wild. It effectively covers two centuries… or, rather, two decades across two centuries. Let’s say 1870s, if we’re being generous, what with the Shaker-ripoff like on the top here, and 1993 for the base. Erickson has a similar wood office chair with modern base on his website, but the harsh, bright, Michael Graves-style maple in the auction here is more alive than the black walnut. The auction here is running $700 and there’s a high-back office chair by Erickson on Chairish for like $1,500, marked way down… and his chairs end at auction for fascinating amounts… sometimes $3,000, sometimes $400. Really preposterously hideous… really one of a kind, really good. The chair’s aesthetics here fit in with an essay I wrote about Michael Graves for

FOR SCALE

in the second print issue (number 2, pick it up) made by that fine newsletter, and my… excitement (?) here fits in with the long essay I have in edits for SNAKE regarding this Atlantic story where the author says culture sucks… It’s one of those weigh-ins that pops up every six months. The writer reports in the piece about the diminishment of culture and well-executed items things being produced in the arts (furniture if it’s an art is frankly hurting the most) and interviews people who are saying that… music, painting/art is dead… it’s fallen off, is less ambitious and so on. The topic’s best addressed at length (maybe ignored outright) but if I can descend into critique here… one argument in response to this like… mainstream whining (I hate when people complain) is that there really is there is good stuff out there if you look. Big, accomplished stuff, minimal, off-the-cuff stuff, whatever. Can’t comment about painting, but in music anyways. It’s not an exciting narrative argument or a story… that there is good stuff out there and it is hidden… and barely written about, not findable, not indexed, but it’s the truth.

There are more good things out there than we can wheedle into a narrative. And another part of that is if you think things suck then you won’t find anything. Is there more good stuff being produced now than, say, all of history, the oldies the kids in the story are listening to? Maybe not. Is there more good stuff now than in 1995? Well, that’s an unfair question: we’ve had 30 years to go through the best of that year. And yeah, it’s definitely tough to find good stuff out there at scale—things that are readily, easily available, be they commercially-produced records or accessible, new chairs. But that’s an entitlement issue. Just because someone has an internet connection and can access the archives doesn’t mean the best of the best is going to land at your door. And so there is good stuff out there. Somewhere. And it’s truly incredible that anyone thinks otherwise. Where’s the humility? In what universe does someone cast such a negative judgment like this? I mean, have you seen everything? Have you been to the ends of the earth? Grow a brain please. In what universe is everything bad or boring? In what universe does one person (who is not deeply cult)… in what universe can anyone get a handle on everything? Or touch everything? You have to like turn over everything before you can make that statement.

People don’t need to dig around every crevice or invest their time in unprofitable or uncommercial art, and one-off things if they don’t want to. But if they don’t put in the time (if they don’t go to the edge) then they should have the humility at least to… well, assume things are alive and well somewhere. Again. There’s good stuff out there, you just need to look harder. That’s the way the world works. Maybe it’s not being made at scale, maybe it’s a one-off, maybe it’s hard to find, maybe nobody is writing about it, maybe it’s just one twisted piece for someone’s apartment. Maybe we won’t have a handle on it for another 30 years. But since when does availability equate to “good”? The New York Times reports that studios in New York are renting for over $3,000. How, in this world, where even fairly-priced housing is out of reach, can people feel so entitled to find satisfying life-affirming good things? This is the best stuff on earth man. It shouldn’t be hard, sure, but it’s not a birthright—you gotta look. Enough with the negativity.

• Anyways the auction also features a desk of the designer’s and a pair of non-wheelie chairs as well (think of the top of this chair, but with the legs… kind of like how classical music is ELO without drums) as a nice selection of high-