The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

posted on April 27th, 2012 in Arts, Celebrity, Parties by seth.Credits: Seth Browarnik

Miami Beach, FL – April 26, 2012 - Bass Museum of Art celebrated its annual fundraiser “A Night at the Museum” on Thursday, April 26 with a private preview of “Charles LeDray: Bass Museum of Art.” Guests explored the new exhibition while enjoying hors d’oeuvres by TiramesU; cocktails & refreshments from Mandarine Napoleon, Kanon Organic Vodka and Societe Perrier; desserts by Stella’s Sweet Shoppe; and beats by Vida’s house DJ. Attendees were also introduced to an innovative silent auction of custom art experiences, including a studio visit and catered lunch with artist Carlos Betancourt and a private tour of WSVN 7 studios and dinner with Deco Drive anchor, Louis Aguirre. Guests included a select group of the city’s leading arts patrons and philanthropists, such as Silvia Karmen Cubina, event co-chairs Criselda Breene and Christina Getty-Maerks, George Lindemann, and Tara Solomon.

 

See all the pics by World Red Eye here: bassmuseumpres.tumblr.com

By ELLEN GAMERMAN

The figure at the center of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" has gone by many names: a fetus, a worm, a tadpole, a skull. It has been dubbed "the portrait of a soul" and "the face that launched 1,000 therapists."

   

 

One of the best-known images in modern art comes up for auction for the first time ever next week, with an $80 million estimate. Ellen Gamerman has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

Now, for the first time in history it is something else: an auction celebrity.

"The Scream" will be on the block at Sotheby's on May 2, the highlight of the Impressionist and modern evening sale in New York. Sotheby's experts anticipate the work will fetch more than $80 million, the highest presale figure the auction house has ever set.

The androgynous wraith grasping its cheeks in dread along an Oslo fiord, created by the Norwegian artist in 1895, is an unpredictable trophy with little precedent, famous as much for the pop-culture spinoffs and parodies it has generated as it is for its artistry. One of four versions of "The Scream" that Munch created, this is the only one not in an Oslo museum and the first to ever come up at auction. Sotheby's is betting big on the work: The auction house could either take credit for selling one of the most expensive artworks ever at auction, or risk embarrassment if its expectations prove too high.

In a rare move, Sotheby's sent the work to private homes in Asia, North America and Europe so key clients could test whether the haunting image clashed with the rest of their art collections. The piece has been removed from its frame for certain serious contenders who wanted to stare at the icon nose-to-nose. The picture recently flew to Hong Kong for 48 hours so a top collector could inspect it in person in a private room at Sotheby's offices.

Potential buyers include European executives, Asian big-spenders and Middle Eastern sheiks. Among the names most often mentioned: the royal family in Qatar, which is building a museum empire and reportedly purchased Paul Cézanne's "The Card Players" for at least $250 million not long ago. Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department in New York, noted fascination with the work in Japan, where "The Scream" is a particularly resonant image, possibly because Munch was influenced by Japanese prints.

The Many Faces of Munch's "The Scream"

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The Simpsons TM and 2012 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

"The Scream" has inspired many pop-culture mash-ups. Here, Homer Simpson swirls with existential dread.

Sotheby's expert Philip Hook estimates a pool of about 10 collectors. His personal theory: Collectors don't tend to spend more than 1% of their net worth on an individual artwork. That leaves "Scream" bidders at people worth $8 billion and up.

Buzz around potential buyers has included international collectors who have successfully stalked masterpieces in the past, like Geneva-based billionaire Lily Safra, who spent $104.3 million for Alberto Giacometti's sculpture, "Walking Man I," or American cosmetics executive Ronald Lauder, who paid $135 million in the private acquisition of Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" for his New York museum. Instead of a large pool of Munch aficionados, art-industry insiders anticipate that a prized work like "The Scream" would more likely draw interest from collectors with broad tastes in blockbuster art, a list that includes Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich and the Greek shipping heir Philip Niarchos. Representatives for the collectors declined to comment.

This month, more than 7,500 people viewed the piece over five days at Sotheby's in London. The artwork sat under glass about 7 feet behind stanchions, watched by security guards. About 350 collectors saw it more intimately at a reception, though Sotheby's took the cautious step of confiscating their Champagne before allowing them to approach the work.

Popperfoto/Getty Images

When he created 'The Scream,' Edvard Munch was in a state of despair: He was turning 30, had no money and was reeling from a disastrous love affair.

Top clients have visited the picture privately at Sotheby's in New York, sitting in high-backed chairs set a short distance from the work inside a locked room. "One of the world's great collectors said, 'I could sell all my pictures, put this on my wall, put my chair here with a cup of coffee and stare at it for the rest of my life and be happy,'" says Mr. Shaw.

The picture goes on wider display to Sotheby's clients in New York starting Friday. The auction house hired a design firm to create a spot-lit installation for the work in a 10th-floor space, covering up the skylights and curtains on nearby windows and allowing the picture to glow as if lighted from within. Though Munch wanted viewers of his work to act as if in church, reverent with hats in hands, plenty of people who have seen "The Scream" haven't been able to resist slapping both cheeks and opening their mouths in a silent "O."

Monaco art dealer David Nahmad says he might bid on "The Scream" if the action stays around $80 million, though not if it soars higher. It's a fraught investment, he says, arguing that the name "Munch" is not as instantly recognizable as others and the resale value is not guaranteed: "If I have the choice to buy a Picasso or a Munch, I would prefer to buy a Picasso," he says. "Everybody knows everything about Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Monet. If you go to somebody in South America and say there's a Munch to buy, he'll say, 'Who's he?'"

The version of the "The Scream" up for sale at Sotheby's is a bright mix of 12 different colors, with the skeletal character in the foreground sporting one blue nostril and one brown one. The third in a series created between 1893 and 1910, the work was created with pastel on rough board. Some art dealers view the pastel as a mark against the work, though others say the lines and colors are more electric than even those found in the painted versions. The picture offers another standout feature: its frame, inscribed with the original 1892 poem Munch wrote that is said to have inspired the work. In it, he describes walking along that fiord, "trembling with anxiety" and sensing "an infinite scream passing through nature."

Ahead of the sale, the auction house printed limited-edition hardcover books for top clients. It produced two videos promoting "The Scream" at auction, one shot on New York's Roosevelt Island to evoke the work's waterside setting, the other a promo with sped-up images of clouds in a blood-red sky set to a throbbing synthesizer score.

Munch wouldn't have necessarily minded such a mass-media campaign. The artist, whose work once was deemed so subversive parents were warned it could give their children chickenpox, was a master of savvy marketing. The Norwegian nicknamed "Bizzarro" early in his career was one of the first artists to charge admission to view his early works. He made the move in 1892 after the Kaiser gave a speech against his paintings in Germany. Munch wasn't making money off sales, but at least he could pocket the entrance fees.

When Munch created the first version of the "The Scream," the alcoholic and chain-smoking artist was in a state of despair: He was turning 30, had no money, was reeling from a disastrous love affair and was terrified that he would succumb to the mental illness that ran in his family, says Munch scholar Sue Prideaux. The artist placed his amoeba-like figure at a popular suicide spot on Oslo's U-shaped bay where passersby could hear screams from a nearby slaughterhouse and insane asylum, Ms. Prideaux says, adding that Munch's sister, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was housed in that asylum. One possible misperception about the work is the scream itself: many art historians say the character is not howling, but blocking out the sound of screams around him.

Art historians call "The Scream" Munch's reaction to Impressionism, which seemed to bore him—he complained it just showed people knitting or reading—and heralded in an era of Expressionism in which artists attempted to dissect their own psychological cores. Before creating "The Scream," Munch had been reading many of the same books and attending the same Paris hospital lectures as Sigmund Freud, says Ms. Prideaux. In the years before "The Scream," Nietzsche had famously philosophized that "God is dead," paving the way for modern explorations of alienation.

The image quickly caught the attention of the freethinking art crowd in Europe. To make the most of the excitement, Munch created black-and-white lithographs so the image could be printed in European magazines and sold individually. He refused to explain the work, further fueling public fascination.

Few Americans have seen "The Scream" in person: The version being sold at Sotheby's was last in the U.S. at Washington's National Gallery of Art in the early 1990s.

In recent decades, the skeletal figure has been reproduced everywhere from ice-cube trays to political posters. A symbol of universal angst, it graced the front of Time magazine's 1961 "Guilt and Anxiety" issue. In more recent years, it has found new life as an ironic mash-up, suggested in the "Home Alone" scream and copied in a cartoon of Homer Simpson as the tortured Nordic soul.

Director Wes Craven says he was first drawn to the howling ghost-face mask that became the star of his "Scream" movies because it reminded him of the Munch image, one of his favorite artworks. "It's a classic reference to just the pure horror of parts of the 20th century, or perhaps just human existence," he says.

Such global exposure has made the work a target. London bookies have offered 20/1 odds on this work getting stolen before the auction. Two other versions of "The Scream" were stolen from Oslo museums. In 1994, thieves brought a ladder to a window at the National Gallery on the first day of the Olympics in Lillehammer and took the work, leaving a note in its place thanking the museum for its lousy security. A decade later, masked gunmen entered the Munch Museum and nabbed "The Scream" and another Munch work. (Mars Inc., which used "The Scream" in advertising for dark-chocolate M&Ms, offered two million M&Ms for the work's return, though that candy reward has not yet been delivered per instructions by Norwegian authorities, according to the company.) Both works were eventually recovered.

Sotheby's has long been laying the groundwork for the Munch market, engineering eight of the top 10 Munch sales in recent years. "We have quite consciously and strategically attempted to build his profile and build a global marketplace," says Mr. Shaw. In 2008, Sotheby's sold "Vampire," a moody painting of a flame-haired woman kissing a man's neck, for $38 million, the artist's auction record. It went to an American after a contest against Russians and others, according to people familiar with the bidding.

But because so few Munchs have come up for auction, collectors don't have much of a sales history to rely on, which could hurt bidder confidence. "Fertility," a Munch pastoral scene that adorned a 2010 Christie's catalog cover, failed to sell at all.

New York art dealer David Nash, who ran Sotheby's international Impressionist and modern department for many years, says that though he expects the work to fetch a high price, he's still surprised by the auction house's "Scream" strategy. "There doesn't seem to be much justification for such a high estimate," he says. "They'd be better off to put a more realistic estimate and let the market determine what the final price is going to be."

Others are more bullish: Skate's Art Market Research, a global art market analyst, estimates the work will sell between $92.5 million and $123.4 million, a figure it arrived at in part by looking at sales of other famous works by artists such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. The standing record for a piece at auction was set in 2010, when Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust" fetched $106.5 million at Christie's. Auction houses keep raising the stakes: This spring, Christie's and Sotheby's Impressionist, modern and contemporary sales are sprinkled with works priced to sell for more than $20 million, estimates rarely ventured a decade ago.

The owner of "The Scream," Petter Olsen, a Norwegian real-estate developer and shipping heir, is trying to win big with the sale. He waived a price guarantee—an arrangement often used in the sale of high-profile items where the auction house assures the seller a minimum sum in exchange for a larger commission.

Mr. Olsen, who through Sotheby's declined to be interviewed, grew up with the work in the living room of his childhood home. It belonged to his father, Thomas Olsen, a patron and neighbor of Munch's in the tiny Norwegian town of Hvitsten. During World War II, Thomas Olsen hid this "Scream" and dozens of other Munch works in a remote hay barn to protect them from the Nazis, who were torching art they declared degenerate.

Over its lifetime, the picture has belonged to just three families. It was originally owned by a German coffee magnate, who probably commissioned the work. Mr. Olsen has said he is selling it in order to fund a museum of Munch's work in Hvitsten to open next year.

In recent years, the international spotlight has shown brightly on the artist. A Munch exhibit drew more than 486,000 visitors to the Centre Pompidou in Paris last year and opens at London's Tate Modern in time for the summer Olympics. Next year marks the 150th anniversary of Munch's birth, an occasion commemorated by a major joint Norwegian museum exhibition (the event has its own Twitter feed).

There may be a physiological reason for the visceral reaction to that figure with its cartoonish skull and gaping mouth. Harvard neurobiology professor Margaret Livingstone found in her research on macaque monkeys that neurons in the brain respond to exaggerated features—huge eyes or tiny noses—more than to common ones. "That's why I think a caricature of an emotion works so well," she says. "It's what our nerve cells are tuned to."

Munch enthusiasts see a simpler explanation for the picture's grip: "A scream is a very human thing," says Karen Nikgol, a co-founder of the Oslo contemporary art space NoPlace. "The inner sorrow or the inner anguish and inner pain, that's timeless."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 27, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Selling 'The Scream'.

An installation view of “Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings,” at L&M Arts through June 2.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: April 26, 2012

The handsome show of Frank Stella’s early paintings at L&M Artscould not be better timed. Abstract art, especially of a Minimalist mien, is on the uptick right now, with a few too many young artists acting as if they have invented the wheel, especially where brushy or severely simplified monochromes are concerned.

 Perhaps this is to be expected. Art is not a science; it does not proceed in a neat, linear progression. Artists often circle back, picking up ideas that their predecessors left undeveloped and trying to push them further. Still, a blast from the past never hurts: the artistic present can never know too much about what has come before.

The rare museum-quality exhibition that is “Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings” is just that kind of blast. It features 13 of the adamant, quietly pulsing, exceedingly frontal paintings that Mr. Stella made in New York in the three and a half years after he arrived here in the summer of 1958, fresh out of Princeton.

This amounts to more early Stellas than have been exhibited in New York since the survey of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. They provide a heady sense of the first few fastest-moving years of his development, when he helped bring the Abstract Expressionist chapter of New York School painting to a close and lay the foundation for Minimalism.

On view are examples of the Black Paintings series, with which he announced himself to the New York art world in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 “Sixteen Americans” exhibition, as well as works from his Aluminum and Copper series, unveiled in his first and second solo shows at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960 and 1962. All the paintings feature repeating bands or stripes of a single color applied to canvases that start out rectangular and end up emphatically shaped, resembling big letters. Also included is “Delta,” a wonderfully shaggy, black-over-dark-red predecessor of these more classic stripe paintings.

These works represent the cornerstone of Mr. Stella’s reputation, the Stellas whose historical importance, as with Picasso’s Cubist paintings, is most widely, if somewhat predictably, accepted. And just as the decimated forms of Cubism introduce an integration between image and surface, the Stellas here progressively articulate a new agreement between painting as image and as object. They hark back to a time when flatness was abstract painting’s primary goal, and the physical facts of the medium were starting to be endlessly parsed — beginning with shaped canvases — in a process that continues today. No artist’s work embodied these pursuits as rigorously as Mr. Stella’s; in the paintings at L&M he laid down the tracks that others followed.

But in this show you also see a young painter edging his way, with some setbacks, toward his first mature statements, making progress that is at times as much physical and technical as anything else. The unevenness and general handmade roughness of the Black Paintings is especially striking. Greatly influenced by Jasper Johns’s flag paintings, Mr. Stella sought an even more rigorous logic between physical and visual by using parallel bands of black that either reiterate or run diagonally to the edges of the canvas.

But the Frank Stella of the Black Paintings was not yet the Frank Stella who famously said, in 1966, “What you see is what you see” — the epitome of a literal, nothing-but-the-facts approach to the medium. Beyond their apparent logic, these early works are also broodingly Romantic, their mood underscored by titles that flirt with darkness, chaos and otherness.

“Bethlehem’s Hospital” takes it name from the London mental institution sometimes known as Bedlam. “Die Fahne hoch!” (“The Flag on High”) echoes a phrase from a Nazi marching song. The most famous title is “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”), the words that were splayed demonically above the gates to Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

Some of the Black Paintings are much stronger than others, with “Bethlehem’s Hospital” and “Arbeit Macht Frei” being especially murky. Their stripes, painted over black washes, are sometimes barely discernible; in certain areas they seem all but monochromatic, which gives them a youthful awkwardness and a reliclike, not-quite-alive aspect.

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“Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings” runs through June 2 at L&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan; (212) 861-0020, lmgallery.com.

 

By Adam Lindemann

April 25, 2012

Alex Israel is a youngish L.A. artist whose pastel-color panel paintings look like the sets of ’80s porn flicks; they’ve been selling like hotcakes at chic galleries in Paris and Berlin. I tried to see his recent one-man show at the übercool and cutting-edge Lower East Side gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art, but the gallery is so übercool and cutting edge that, on the Friday afternoon I chose for my visit, it wasn’t even open. In fact, the two times I have ventured to this gallery in an attempt to see an exhibition, during regular gallery hours, they have managed to have the doors locked and the lights turned off. I’d given up on writing about Mr. Israel’s work, when I realized that I could simply review his new TV show, As It LAys, the one he’s recently uploaded to You Tube and for which he created a website: www.asitlays.com. This interview show, with Mr. Israel as host, reminds me of Andy Warhol’s famous “Screen Tests”: both projects are, in superficially different but actually very similar ways, forms of video portraiture.

 

The so-called “Screen Tests” that Warhol made in the early ’60s weren’t really screen tests at all. Warhol shoved his camera in his subject’s face and did a two-and-a-half-minute film. Whether it was a factory regular like Edie Sedgwick or Lou Reed, or some celebrity like Bob Dylan or Salvador Dalí, didn’t really matter, because in the end all the subjects were just meat to grind in Warhol’s lens, reminders that youth, beauty, sex, fame and fortune exist only in the moment.

 

Before As It LAys, Mr. Israel’s claim to fame was that he was once an assistant to the late L.A. artist Jason Rhoades and served as the doorman for Rhoades’s infamous “Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé” parties. Now Mr. Israel has succeeded in taking the Warhol screen test to a whole new level by doing interviews with celebrities and quasi-celebrities in which he reads a series of bizarre and awkward questions—to Rachel Zoe, “If you were to create the perfect salad, what would be the key ingredients?”—from a set of index cards he shuffles in his hands. His subjects are left trying to tell a personal story without help or support from their interlocutor. Mr. Israel’s portraits, which seem to both emerge from and comment on the current Facebook/Twitter sound bite zeitgeist, are painful in the way Warhol’s once were: they exist in an existential space devoid of human emotion or sympathy.

 

Unlike Warhol’s project, for the most part, Mr. Israel’s guests are older, passé. They are walking, talking pieces of L.A.’s cultural history. Taken together, they represent a sampling of L.A. personalities who were once at the center of the scene but now have one foot—or, in some cases, both feet—out the door.

 

A TV-style interview where the questions are read right off note cards in a harsh and empty environment is a strange thing to watch. But only a few of Mr. Israel’s victims realize they are being set up; most of them just writhe and sweat in their seats. I feel their pain. In the end I was left wondering: what is it like to have once been famous and important in L.A.? What comes after that?

 

His questions run the gamut from banal to bizarre. Adrienne Maloof, a reality-TV “housewife of Beverly Hills,” is asked, “Did you ever cheat on a test?” She answers without hesitation, “No, I helped others, the whole football team.” Yet she never seems to reflect on what she just revealed to us, namely her relations with the “whole football team.” Restaurateur Mr. Chow is asked, “In the battle between people and robots who wins?” His answer should have been “Get lost,” but instead he responds, “Nature is more precise than a machine, every leaf is unique, just like every thumbprint … a robot is a machine and therefore has limitations.” And it’s funny! It gets worse when 71-year-old singer-songwriter Paul Anka is asked, “Chocolate or vanilla?” and gives a three-minute monologue. Or when Jon Peters, the once-famous film producer and head of Sony pictures (and ex-Barbra Streisand hairdresser) gets caught in a trap when he’s asked, “Are you a good storyteller?” and answers, with candor, “When I was a kid I was more of a liar, but when I grew up I made those lies into a fantasy.”

 

Their moment in the spotlight may be over, but all of these guests are still dead set on proving their relevance, so much so that they are willing to talk at length to this unknown artist/interviewer. Most of them end up, tragically, revealing their hollow “screen test” side. L.A. is a city obsessed with youth and power; it must not be very pleasant to feel marginalized in a place where you were once the center of attention.

 

That said, it’s not all tragedy. At 95, Phyllis Diller gets credit, in my book, just for showing up. When asked, “Are you reading anything?” she supplies the riposte, “I cannot read. I am losing my eyesight.” Other interviewees didn’t have such an easy out, and that makes for moments that are strangely poignant. Asked, “What do you want the world to know about you?” the seven-time NBA All-Star James Worthy replies, uncomfortably, “Basketball is what I did for a living but it’s not who I am as a person.”

 

There are some deliciously awkward moments. Cheryl Tiegs, the ravishing beauty who in 1975 graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, doesn’t fare very well; she reveals that her favorite karaoke song is “At Last” by Etta James. Quincy Jones is asked, “What is your favorite color?” Doesn’t he remember the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when Sir Galahad is asked the very same question and answers: ”blue … uh, no … green” and gets tossed down a ravine for his “mistake”? Clearly he doesn’t, because he sheepishly answers, “Purple, um … and lime, black and uh … orange,” then gives the camera a pained smile. Perhaps the most cringe-worthy of the interviews is the one with JFK’s nephew Bobby Shriver, who is painfully politically correct. “Who would you most like to meet?” he is asked, and he implausibly replies, “I once opened the door to a room and there was Luciano Pavarotti … it was too much for me.” How absurd for this to come from the man who created the global RED charity with his friend the rock star Bono. Oh, Mr. Shriver. Are we now to believe you were never into rock and roll, that all along you had us fooled, and were actually an opera buff?

 

Three of Mr. Israel’s guests managed to turn the tables on their host—no mean feat. Producer Rick Rubin answers every questions with a single word: “Yes … sometimes … somewhat … no …” Even when asked the final “What do you want the world to know about you?” he refuses to humor Mr. Israel. “I can’t think of anything,” he deadpans. Novelist Bret Easton Ellis takes Mr. Israel to task. When asked, “What do you want the world to know about Bret Easton Ellis?” he replies, “Nothing. I don’t want them to know anything.” Androgynous rock star Marilyn Manson steals the show with a performance. The question ”Have you ever considered going vegan?” is answered, “I considered having sex with a vegan but then I wondered if she would say, ‘Oooh, what’s in your semen?’” When asked, “If you could change one thing about your physical appearance what would it be?” he answers, “Not having such a big dick … it’s troublesome sometimes.” Yes, Mr. Manson, this must be a serious problem for you indeed!

 

I interviewed Mr. Israel in L.A. last week and tested my theories on him. Weren’t the questions written to make a mockery of the interviewees? He denied that, claiming that he hadn’t even written them. “My intern wrote mild-mannered questions,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be a talk show with hot-button questions.” Hadn’t he deliberately selected individuals whose moment of relevance had passed, whose stars had faded? He took offense at that interpretation. “That’s such a cynical view,” he said. ”I selected people who made a major contribution to the L.A. landscape at a point in time … that’s our city’s cultural history and I chose to celebrate it.”

 

As part of the Facebook generation, Mr. Israel is perfectly comfortable giving a campy and nostalgic embrace to L.A.’s history, while feigning ignorance of the tragic implications of living in the past. Perhaps he is earnest; his project, complete with his intern’s “mild-mannered” questions, really isn’t, after all, a cynical satire of the talk-show format. Still, am I a throwback to another era because I was looking for deeper meaning, even where there is none?

 

Perhaps I’m equally unrealistic because in growing older I still hope to grow better, or wiser, or at least more comfortable with what, where and who I am. In As It LAys, success, fame and cultural relevance are not the recipe for happiness or even personal satisfaction. The project reveals several variations on the theme of self-deception; perhaps with age this is something we all fall prey to. In the words of the great 17th-century French thinker François de la Rochefoucauld, “One is never so easily fooled as when one thinks one is fooling others.”

Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

Sway lights by CKR for Established & Sons.

By JULIE LASKY

Published: April 25, 2012

SOME of the most thought-provoking ideas at the International Furniture Fair in Milan, which ended on Sunday, issued not from the thousands of exhibition booths and off-site venues or even from the lips of the designers, pundits and producers who bring this stalwart city to life every April. They were written on the walls.

Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

The Dutch designer Frederick Roijé with his Dish of Desire bird feeder.

“Thanks Starck,” read one such message, scrawled in the neighborhood of Ventura Lambrate, where for the third consecutive year emerging designers have shown work and staged Oedipal battles with the masters. The words accompanied a drawing of Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif lemon squeezer from 1990, an aluminum teardrop on spidery legs with a knob intended for mauling citrus — but the artist had substituted a toilet paper roll for the lemon.

Such an irreverent treatment of a classic object suggests that Mr. Starck may have lost his mojo in today’s design world, but he shows no sign of receding from the scene. On the contrary, his notoriously paradoxical nature defined this year’s fair, which was marked by the contradictory pursuits of social consciousness and unrestrained luxury.

Mr. Starck may be best known for a whimsical $100 sculpture that does nothing more than extract juice. But he also is — or claims to be — as idealistic as any young designer.

He alternately caters to lovers of luxury and slaps them on the wrist. This year, he collaborated with Lenny Kravitz on upholstered versions of his Mademoiselle chair for the high-end Italian company Kartell, but he also touted his Broom chair for the American company Emeco, made of 90 percent recycled post-industrial factory waste and 10 percent glass. “With this new chair, I start to feel happy,” he said in a promotional film for the product, “because it is made of nothing.”

A decade ago, socially conscious design was a sideshow at the fair, but now it’s in the center ring. A number of companies boasted of earth-friendly materials and showed off efficient packing methods that reduced their carbon footprints. The Swedish company Offecct went so far as to display Luca Nichetto’s Robo chair from 2010 along with its box to show how compactly it can be taken apart and shipped.

Food was a popular medium for commentary. In Lambrate, Rui Pereira and Ryosuke Fukusada baked tiny cakes shaped like chairs, lamps and vases to protest the hyperabundance of new furniture and the inability of consumers to “digest” it. And in the Tortona district, Marleen Jansen presented her Seesaw Table, which requires two diners to sit down to meals and depart from the table at precisely the same time — or else risk sending one of the pair flying.

“It’s a courtesy table,” Ms. Jansen said. “I want to manipulate behavior, and it’s rude to leave the table while eating.”

On the frontiers of experimentation, the “Open Design Archipelago” exhibition organized by Domus magazine and Audi demonstrated methods for harnessing the desert sun to melt sand and produce glass objects; for manufacturing inexpensive chairs with a robotic arm (no human hands needed); and for training crows to pick up bottle caps littering the landscape.

And yet, while there were plenty of designers trying to redirect human habits and prepare for a world with scarce resources, many conventional products seemed to have gotten bigger and softer, assuming a standard of padded comfort one might even call American.

Furniture came with names like Soft Box, the Swiss designer Alfred Häberli’s cushy sofa for Moroso. And the body-cradling Bunny armchair by Iskos-Berlin, for the Danish company Normann Copenhagen, was all but infantilizing.

But nothing conveyed the sensuality of textiles (or their facsimile) this year so much as the flowing tablecloth carved into the wood of Ferruccio Laviani’s Twaya table for Emmemobili. A representative of the Italian company Emmemobili noted that, by the end of the fair, the number of hands rubbing the table’s surface had left “the left side smoother than the right.”...