Each year at Design Miami/ Basel a number of the world’s premier design galleries take up residence in carefully curated spaces within the Herzog & de Meuron designed building.
For seven days the vast hall serves as home for the collectors, critics, press and dealers as they interact, and ultimately, transact, while across the road the art world does the same at Art Basel.
As they bide their time, waiting for that “sale of the fair,” it’s not usually very easy to coax the big players away from their stalls, let alone to disrupt their displays, but this year we managed to do just that.
We asked seven design experts to select a chair to be interviewed on in the middle of the fair. Lover of Prouvé Patrick Seguin was joined by Milan’s Nina Yashar, Maria Foerlev from Copenhagen and Gloria Cortina from Mexico City, among others.
“I think chopsticks are an extremely good example,” said Friedman Benda’s co-founder Marc Benda when asked what design object we should abolish.
When it came to this year’s trends, Loic LeGaillard, co-founder of Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery commented, “I think people are looking for more than design, as such. They like the idea that behind a piece of design there is a narrative, there is a story.”
When asked to explain why design is important, art collector and critic Kenny Schachter replied: “2017 is an age of heightened anxiety and chaos in the world unfortunately, and art and design is a respite from all of this chaos that is surrounding us.”