By WILLARD SPIEGELMAN

Tulsa, Okla.

Black gold, aka oil, turns into real gold, which often makes for artistic wealth and civic pride. Consider the case of this city in the green country of eastern Oklahoma, a landscape that resembles the gently rolling hills of adjacent Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas more than the dustbowl plains of the western part of the state or the Texas panhandle. Until the mid-1950s, Tulsa was the undisputed international capital of the oil industry. Men became rich, almost overnight. Some of them did great things with their gains.

Waite Phillips (1883-1964), whose brothers had already amassed a major company in Bartlesville, developed his own petroleum company here and sold it in 1925 for the then-enormous sum of $25 million. That's when the real fun began. The grand result was his in-town villa, Philbrook, 72 rooms on 23 acres, which he had built in 1927 for himself, his wife and two children, and which he began filling with the art that still hangs on the walls and stuffs the cabinets here. This estate would not seem out of place in Hollywood. But the Phillips family stayed here for less than a dozen years. In 1938 they deeded the house to the city. Then they moved to the penthouse of a downtown skyscraper; and the Philbrook Museum opened in 1939.

The "house museum" is a lovely genre whose members include the more famous Frick Collection in New York and Gardner Museum in Boston. We go to them for the art and also to breathe the air and get a feeling for how the owner-occupants lived and what made them tick. Philbrook mixes Greek, Italian Renaissance, Baroque and Southwestern styles, the building covered by red-tile roofs, in an engaging hodgepodge. Its beautifully landscaped gardens, which include fountains and a classical tempietto, are the go-to spot for Tulsans who want backdrops for wedding photos.

Phillips had a taste for western things—his "man cave" rooms are on the ground floor—while his wife, Genevieve, went in for French style. The museum's collection has 12,000 items and constitutes a modest encyclopedia as well as a fortuitous anthology of Phillips and post-Phillips bequests, the most splendid of which are 40 Italian Renaissance works (34 paintings, six sculptures), a handout from Samuel H. Kress, the five-and-dime-store magnate who disposed of his vast holdings, most generously to Washington's National Gallery, throughout the mid-20th century.

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Evan Taylor

The main Philbrook campus includes beautifully landscaped gardens.

The Kress works at the Philbrook include some strong and interesting pictures: an "Enthroned Madonna" attributed to Gentile da Fabriano; Tanzio da Varallo's very buff St. John the Baptist (1627); a Madonna from a follower of Andrea Mantegna; a splendid small portrait of a bearded man attributed to Giovanni Bellini; and other impressive pictures by Carpaccio and Piero di Cosimo. For a schoolchild in the middle of the middle of the country, far from Chicago or even Kansas City, these works—no four-star masterpieces—define what we used to call the Renaissance. They are approachable (when I visited the museum in mid-April, it was as silent as a tomb) and all are in perfect condition.

Most of the Phillips furniture has gone, and the original building has been adapted for the display of art. Architectural additions have been made, but the bones of the house survive, as do charming details, like the frescoes by Philadelphia artist George Gibbs on the walls of the music room, which depict four "tempos" (Allegro, Andante, Rondo and Scherzo) in neoclassical tableaux with young girls who look like nothing so much as 1920s flappers with bobbed hair and flowing gowns.

Although the villa's low ceilings and dark rooms are not ideal for the display of art, French pictures by Rosa Bonheur, Eugène Boudin, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny and Edouard Vuillard look pretty good. Even better, in an adjacent gallery added to the original house, is the Herbert and Roseline Gussman Collection (he was a New Yorker who moved to Oklahoma, one of several prominent Jewish oilmen in the state), 450 works that came to the Philbrook. Paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Georges Roualt, Pablo Picasso, Raoul Dufy and André Derain comfortably command the wall space.

The appealing house really cannot display larger, modern and contemporary work. But on June 14 the museum is opening Philbrook Downtown, an industrial space, in the Brady Arts District. Like much of Tulsa, this wonderful old neighborhood of low brick buildings and unused warehouses is redolent of Art Deco style. New restaurants, galleries and lofts are springing up. Think Brooklyn, or even Berlin, on the Arkansas River. Much of this development comes courtesy of the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The new place will free up space in the villa for the display of some of the collection's 600 Asian works, none of which is up now. More American Indian pottery and baskets will come out of storage, and will be joined in the downtown facility by the newly acquired Eugene B. Adkins Collection.

Under the energetic leadership of Randall Suffolk, the museum's director since 2007, the Philbrook has increased attendance by 50% and changed its programming to include more family-friendly events. In a city where horrible race riots occurred 90 years ago, and which still bears traces of the American Indian displacement of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Mr. Suffolk proudly notes that 42% of the museum's visitors come from minority populations, versus an average of 9% nationally.

The downtown facility joins a complex of arts buildings (plus a lovely adjacent green space, on which concerts and exercise classes are already taking place) that includes the archives of Woody Guthrie, one of Oklahoma's most famous sons, embraced more warmly after his death than during his life. This socialist songwriting minstrel of the plains has been reborn, courtesy of his state's wealthy philanthropists. It's an appropriate irony. This land is everyone's land.

Mr. Spiegelman, who writes about the arts for the Journal, lives in Dallas.

An Artist Depicts His Demons

Cristiano Bendinelli for The New York Times

One of Ai Weiwei’s dioramas that recreate his harrowing experiences as a prisoner of the Chinese authorities. More Photos »

By EDWARD WONG

Published: May 26, 2013

BEIJING — For a year and a half the artist Ai Weiwei and a sculptor friend oversaw a team of 20 to 30 people toiling away here in secret on one of his most political and personal projects.

Their task was to reconstruct scenes from Mr. Ai’s illegal detention in 2011, when he was held for 81 days in a secret prison guarded by a paramilitary unit. What took shape this spring at an industrial space in the Chinese capital were six fiberglass dioramas that depict, at half-scale, his often banal daily existence as a captive of the vast government security apparatus.

The dioramas were quietly transported out of China — Mr. Ai declined to say exactly how — to Venice, where they will be publicly exhibited starting on Tuesday in a church being used as an art gallery by the Zuecca Project Space, in parallel with the 2013 Venice Biennale, though not officially part of it.

Each diorama is enclosed in a 2 ½-ton iron box. There are sculptures of Mr. Ai sleeping, eating, showering, undergoing interrogation and sitting on the toilet, all under the watch of two young guards in green uniforms. Mr. Ai said the details were meticulously recreated from memory, down to his blue flip-flops and the white padding taped to the walls of the room.

Along with an obscenity-laced music video posted online last week, the dioramas are the first of Mr. Ai’s pieces to address his detention, which was the most difficult period of his life, he said.

On a recent morning at his studio and home in northern Beijing, he explained in an interview that his goal was simple: “To give people a clear understanding of the conditions.” An assistant used an iPad to show visitors photographs of the dioramas while a shaved cat padded around, looking forlorn.

Mr. Ai, 56, has another work being shown by Zuecca, one that comments on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He also has a more conceptual piece at Venice that uses 800 small wooden stools and is an attempt, Mr. Ai said, to build a “monsterlike lively structure” that is “completely dysfunctional.” That work is part of a group exhibition put together by the curator for the German Pavilion in the Biennale, though the exhibition will be displayed in the French Pavilion as a gesture symbolizing ties between the two nations. Mr. Ai’s artwork is making its first appearance in the Biennale since his debut there in 1999.

“China is still in constant warfare, with destroying individuals’ nature, including people’s imaginations, curiosity, motivations, dreams,” Mr. Ai said. “This state’s best minds have been wasted by this high ideological control, which is fake. Even the people who are trying to use it as a tool to maintain power or stability know that this is a completely fake condition.”

Mr. Ai’s vitriol against the Communist Party has made him a polarizing figure in the Chinese art world. Many artists quietly resent the attention Mr. Ai has received from the West, as well as his occasional denunciations of other Chinese, including former friends, who are unwilling to take the same uncompromising stand against the party.

Critical reception in the West to his recent art varies — a 2010 exhibition of sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern in London was widely praised, while a 2012 retrospective at the Hirshhorn in Washington had mixed reviews.

“Can political art still be good art?” Mr. Ai said. “Those questions have been around for too long. People are not used to connecting art to daily struggle, but rather use high aesthetics, or so-called high aesthetics, to try to separate or purify humans’ emotions from the real world.”

The earthquake-related artwork in Venice literally builds on Mr. Ai’s previous political criticism. For the Hirshhorn show, Mr. Ai’s work “Straight” consisted of a pile of long reinforced steel bars from the Sichuan earthquake sites, which he collected and then had straightened. At Venice Mr. Ai is again exhibiting a pile of the bars, but double in terms of weight, for a total of 90 tons.

As earlier, the piece is meant to criticize how corruption in China has led to shoddy construction across the country and thus to loss of lives in the quake. Nearly 90,000 people were killed or missing, including more than 5,000 children who died when schools collapsed.

“It will remain for a long time to remind people what happened,” Mr. Ai said. “Until today they have never answered our questions.”

Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, said in general, “Weiwei has been looking, in the years since his detention, for a way to use art to talk about social issues in a way that still codes and functions as art.” The metal rods from Sichuan, he said, are “a good example of his search for this middle road between overtly political and purely formal.”

The six dioramas, titled “S.A.C.R.E.D,” are more personal. Since his release two years ago, Mr. Ai has been obsessing over the details of his detention and the ordeals of several friends persecuted at the same time. In late 2011 he gave several long interviews to The New York Times in which he described the conditions of his detention and his daily activities. The details in the dioramas are consistent with his earlier accounts, down to the color of the wallpaper.

“I am sure that it will be a powerful piece,” said Karen Smith, an art historian and independent curator who has seen photographs of the project. “In spite of the fact that to all outward appearances Weiwei seems to be holding up well and maintaining his focus in the period since his detention, this work suggests a need to confront the ‘demon’ that such an experience certainly represents for him.”

She added, “Although this work will seem like a very public indictment of the system, the personal aspect of the piece will no doubt be the element that lends it weight.”

Officials are still holding his passport and the police sometimes follow him to unlikely places (a ski resort, for instance), but Mr. Ai has more freedom than he did in the first year after his release. The loosening of surveillance is demonstrated by the fact that he was able to work secretly on both the dioramas and the music video, which was shot by Christopher Doyle, a renowned cinematographer, in a life-size model of Mr. Ai’s cell.

Mr. Ai said he is almost through mining his detention for his art, but there is one more project to come.

“I have a book I’m writing,” he said. “It’s already 80 percent finished. I have this terrible responsibility: I have to record every stupid detail, and it’s so dry and so boring, and to me it’s so terrible. That’s why it’s taken me two years to try to finish it. Every time I sat down, it was a struggle — ‘Why do I have to write this down?’ But I have to. This is just an obligation.”

The George Lindemann Journal

In the increasingly crowded field of stuffed fabric sculptures, Aiko Hachisuka’s stand out for their deliberation and complexity and for their sleights of hand. At first sight, the five sculptures in her New York solo debut suggest giant, colorfully glazed ceramic planters or tea bowls; their bright surfaces almost gleam.        The tactile reality of these big, barrel-like forms quickly reveals itself, however; then comes the recognition that the textiles used are all garments individually stuffed and carefully stitched together. Shirt collars and sleeves emerge, as do pant legs, the necks of sweaters and the occasional pleated skirt. Sometimes tangles of human forms are intimated: an arm flung here, a leg there. (They can bring to mind the jumbled limbs and lavishly patterned kimonos found in erotic Japanese woodblock prints.) The final realization is that the fabrics’ patterns are often supplemented by scattered shards of bright red, gold, green and other tones. These result from applying silk-screen ink to a tightly bunched garment that may then be rebunched and painted with a contrasting color. Or, after painting, the garment may be smoothed out and pressed against a second garment, making a kind of monoprint. The applied color covers the forms like a net, holding them together while also suggesting the crushed metals of John Chamberlain’s sculptures. The process of making these works is more elaborate than their content, which is to say that they verge on craft. They are also so complete that it is difficult to see where Ms. Hachisuka will take them from here, but it will be interesting to watch.

The George Lindemann Journal

By JENNIFER MALONEY

Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

Picasso's 'Woman in an Armchair (Eva)'

As curator Emily Braun stepped inside a Zurich vault with billionaire art collector Leonard Lauder, the small painting they had come to see made her giddy with excitement.

Ms. Braun, the private curator of Mr. Lauder's world-class collection of cubist art, was encouraging him to fill a gap in the collection by acquiring "The Oil Mill," a rare landscape by Pablo Picasso painted in a Catalan village in 1909. Passed down through the family of a French collector, it hadn't been seen in public for 70 years.

Standing before it, "we just couldn't contain ourselves," Ms. Braun recalled. Still, the cosmetics magnate wasn't convinced it was the right fit for his collection. Five years later, in 2000, he came around to her thinking and bought it.

Ms. Braun, known by friends and colleagues as "Mimi," has for 26 years been at Mr. Lauder's side, helping him shape a renowned collection of 78 cubist artworks that last month he donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The works, by Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, are valued at $1 billion.

"We formed, I think, a very, very powerful partnership," Mr. Lauder said. "She and I are joined at the hip."

In addition to serving as steward of Mr. Lauder's cubist collection, a part-time job for which she is on call 24 hours a day, Ms. Braun is an art-history professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has also written books, curated shows and contributed to exhibition catalogs. She is co-curating an exhibition of the Lauder collection planned by the Met next year and guest curating a retrospective of the Italian painter Alberto Burri at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2015.

Friends and colleagues say she moves effortlessly from the scholarly world, where she is known for doggedly tracking down historical details, to the art market, where she keeps tabs on which cubist works are available for sale—and whether they merit Mr. Lauder's consideration. (With Ms. Braun's help, Mr. Lauder will continue to acquire works for the collection even after it goes to the Met.)

"A lot of my job has been saying no before things get to him," said Ms. Braun, 55 years old.

To avoid conflicts of interest, Ms. Braun is paid on retainer by Mr. Lauder, rather than at a percentage of the purchase price of the works she advises on. This is in keeping with the ethical guidelines of the College Art Association. She also discloses her side job each year to the university.

Ms. Braun grew up near Toronto. She studied art history at the University of Toronto and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where she completed her Ph.D. on the modernist Italian artist Mario Sironi and the politics of art under fascism.

Throughout her studies, she held jobs that kept her connected to the contemporary-art world. In 1984, she was hired as a consultant to commission works by artists including Sol LeWitt and Scott Burton for the public spaces in and around the new headquarters for the Equitable Life Assurance Society, then being developed in midtown Manhattan. She was 27 years old and had a budget of $10 million.

While Ms. Braun was conducting research in Italy, her friend Dorothy Kosinski was working in Switzerland as curator of the collection of the late British art historian and collector Douglas Cooper. Ms. Kosinski, who is now director of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., invited Ms. Braun for a tour of the Cooper collection in Geneva, which included stunning Picassos and Braques stored in crates in a cold warehouse.

Not long after, in January 1987, Ms. Braun met Mr. Lauder for a job interview in New York. She had been recommended by her professor, Kirk Varnedoe, then an adjunct curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Lauder explained that he intended to assemble a museum-quality collection of cubist art. "Very desirous of impressing him, I said, 'Oh, I think you should go to this collection that's sitting in a warehouse in Switzerland,' " Ms. Braun recalled. Mr. Lauder grinned and said: "I just bought that."

Mr. Lauder ultimately decides which works to buy. But each addition to his cubist collection has been preceded by in-depth conversations with Ms. Braun, whom Mr. Lauder described as "my partner and teacher and mentor."

While Mr. Lauder evaluates art on aesthetic grounds—looking for works, he said, that "sing to me"—he relies on his curator to weigh in on each work's historical significance, provenance, and physical condition.

Ms. Braun has traveled across the U.S. and Europe to view works that might interest her boss. Well-known as Mr. Lauder's curator, she tries not to tip her hand: When she attends an auction preview, she looks at everything, so as not to drive up bidding on a work he is after.

The first painting from Mr. Lauder's cubist collection was put on display at the Met last month: "Woman in an Armchair (Eva)," painted by Picasso in 1913 or early 1914. Mr. Lauder bought it in 1997 at a Christie's auction for $24.7 million.

Acquisitions are only part of Ms. Braun's job. As the collection's steward, she has overseen conservation efforts, arranged loans to museums and invited scholars to view works at Mr. Lauder's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Perhaps most importantly, she has spearheaded research on every work in the collection. A trove of archival materials documenting the life of each painting and drawing—including photographs, catalogs, inventories and articles—will go to the Met along with the collection.

Historical riddles that Ms. Braun is investigating include a painting hiding on the backside of a Léger painting in the collection. At some point, the artist crossed it out with diagonal brush strokes in diluted black paint. Did he ever exhibit that side of the canvas? She is still digging to find the answer.

Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com

The George Lindemann Journal

“Sacrilege (2012),” a blowup version of Stonehenge by the English artist Jeremy Deller, is part of the “Inflation!” exhibition at Mobile M+ in Hong Kong.

 By JOYCE LAU

The inaugural Art Basel Hong Kong, which opens to the public Thursday, has drawn planeloads of collectors and gallery bigwigs from the West, lured here in part by the growing, glittery market. It’s billed as a mutually beneficial arrangement: Art Basel capitalizes on the moneyed collectors heading to Hong Kong, while giving international credibility and exposure to local artists, galleries and the city itself.       

But as Hong Kong welcomes its new guest for four days of openings, parties and lunches, there are also some backstage jitters about finally being on the world stage, as well as trepidation that an event that started as ART HK will lose its distinctively Asian flavor. Art Basel has taken over ART HK, which began as a local fair in 2008 with about 100 galleries and quickly doubled in size, reflecting the city’s growing art market. (Hong Kong is planning to pour billions of dollars into developing a cultural district in West Kowloon.)

“You can feel the difference in the air — there’s a lot of anticipation,” said Nicole Schoeni, a local gallery owner. “Art Basel is a very well-established professional art fair with immense knowledge. We can benefit and learn from it.”

But, she added, “Who knows how it will go this week?”

To try to ease concerns, Art Basel retained Magnus Renfrew, Art HK’s director since its inception, and he has taken pains to maintain its roughly 50-50 division of Western and Asian participating galleries. Art Basel, in a nod to the local culture, also abandoned its original plan to hold the event in February, when it would have run up against Lunar New Year.

Still, Art Basel’s influence is easy to spot.

The week started with the first art gala to be held at the Asia Society Hong Kong headquarters, which opened last year. On Monday night, as a tropical storm lashed the $50 million complex, a renovated 19th-century British Army compound, about 200 invitees rubbed shoulders with major dealers and artists like Takashi Murakami. At one table, exquisitely bejeweled Korean women plotted which dealers to meet, while lamenting how hard it was now to hit both Frieze New York, which ended last week, and this newly ascendant fair (which was at least closer to home).

The fair has an iPhone app and a catalog “like a telephone directory,” Mr. Renfrew said. “The quality is really a step up. The architecture is much improved. We have a huge V.I.P. lounge with views of the harbor. The expectations of the visitors are higher, and there is increased interest from collectors, both from the U.S. and around Asia.”

Local galleries planned their best shows, installations and openings for this week. But of the fair’s 245 galleries — chosen from more than 600 applicants — only 26 have a permanent presence in Hong Kong, and many of those are relatively recent imports like White Cube, Gagosian, Ben Brown and Lehmann Maupin.

Even a few local boosters will admit that the paucity of Hong Kong galleries is largely a reflection of the weakness of the local art scene. In past ART HK events, pride of place went to Western galleries, mostly from London, showing celebrity artists like Damien Hirst.

“They made an effort to include Asian galleries, but, of course, they have to choose the right galleries,” said Pearl Lam, an eccentric violet-haired dealer who made a splash last year when she timed the opening of her new Hong Kong space with the 2012 ART HK fair. “What we need is to increase standards so that our own galleries can compete with Western galleries. It’s not good enough to just have Art Basel here.”

To that end, Ms. Lam hosted a lunch for collectors on Tuesday with Paul Moorhouse of the National Portrait Gallery in London, who is curating the abstract painter Zhu Jinshi’s first solo show in Hong Kong, opening at Ms. Lam’s space this week.

Another problem is a lack of plain old experience. While there are now almost 100 galleries in Hong Kong, only a few were around when the Chinese art scene first boomed in the 1980s.

Ms. Schoeni, who took over her gallery from her father, Manfred Schoeni, is one of those who have seen the changes. “When dad started 20 years ago, there were only a handful of galleries in Hong Kong,” she said. “It wasn’t until 2004 that auction houses started paying attention to contemporary Chinese art, and that’s when the big market boom — the big gallery boom — came.”

But even now, exposure to the West remains limited. Ms. Schoeni points to the Hong Kong artist Hung Keung, whom she chose for an interactive solo show during Basel.

“He’s garnered international attention among critics and has been collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art, but he hasn’t had much exposure on the commercial level,” she said. “He will be teaching participants about Chinese characters and inviting people to create their own characters, which will then be animated and digitized for his next work.”

Many gallery owners are not worried. Henry Au-yeung of Grotto Fine Art, which represents local artists, said of Art Basel, “They did the right thing in being more inclusive, in presenting Hong Kong art, and not just using Hong Kong as a platform for selling.”

“If you go to a fair in New York,” he added, “there will be a lot of New York galleries. Same for London. And, hopefully, it will be the same for Hong Kong.”

The George Lindemann Journal

Clockwise from top right, work by Tamera Leigh Staten; ChiLab; Milton Glaser; Lladró Atelier’s Dazzle collection; Dirk Vander Kooij. More Photos »

 By JULIE LASKY

Published: May 22, 2013

The 25th International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which ended Tuesday, offered many surprises. There were dollhouse-size candelabra inserted into hanging glass bulbs like ships in a bottle and a coffee table whose base was sheathed in python. There was even wallpaper inspired by a 1909 New York Times article about a monkey in a bathhouse.

But nothing caught the eye like the colossal head of William Shakespeare emerging from an African carpet.

Shakespeare in Africa, part of a rug collection by Milton Glaser for the Spanish company Nanimarquina, reflects the 83-year-old graphic designer’s efforts to yoke together disparate subjects in a way that avoids scrambling the brain. “I wanted to take two things that have no relationship with each other,” Mr. Glaser said, “and do what art does: to unify the apparently unrelated.”

He wasn’t alone in his shoehorning. Two booths away, another Spanish company, Lladró, presented several of its porcelain figurines, including a classic macaw, wrapped in World War I-era camouflage. A news release for the collection, which is called Dazzle, explained the concept as “the art of disguise, of the unrecognizable and the imperceptible.”

Add to that the art of the remix. In design, as in any creative endeavor, mashups paradoxically represent inexhaustible possibilities as well as the plateau of invention. You can cover a macaw in any number of patterns, but the real challenge lies in moving beyond the bird. Given Spain’s economic trials, Lladró may be forgiven for making cosmetic adjustments to existing pieces rather than hiring designers to produce a new collection and investing in new molds.

But Dazzle wasn’t just a mash-up; it was also a mascot. The furniture fair — along with a host of exhibitions and openings taking place over the re-branded 12-day festival called NYCxDesign — showed that design is all over the map, its contours muddled and its direction uncertain.

To be sure, when more than 500 exhibitors from around the world put on a show, as they did at ICFF, you can expect diversity. But you should also be able to pick out coherent strains of form, material or style.

Apart from a mysterious eruption of bronze and copper objects, and Swarovski’s ongoing search for another household product in which to embed its crystals, those strains weren’t clear. Several years of recession have taken their toll on innovation. And while there were many goods to admire, few had the uplifting effect of groundbreaking design.

“I’m not seeing a lot of new ideas,” said Noel Wiggins, the founder of the New York design company Areaware, which is known for producing whimsical objects by local designers and this year showed a new version of a radio dock by Jonas Damon with an app for tuning in only public radio stations. “The design languages of the last five years are still with us.”

And yet there were nascent signs of what may be next. With each ICFF, more emissaries show up from the frontiers of technology to demonstrate how computer-controlled tools will transform the look, price and environmental impact of objects.

For example, the British designer Tom Dixon, who previously showed teams assembling lighting fixtures to demonstrate how easy it is to produce one’s own designs, this year appeared with a digital laser cutter and other tools to create what was, in effect, a portable pollution-free factory making lacy metal pendant lamps.

And Dirk Vander Kooij, a young Dutch designer, showed the Chubby chair, made with a robotic arm that extrudes brightly colored recycled plastic in a continuous line. Each chair takes about a half-hour to produce, Mr. Vander Kooij said, and sells for around $400. He also showed Chubby coat hangers, created from the variegated material the robot spits out when Mr. Vander Kooij changes the color of the plastic. The hangers are about $130 for a set of eight.

Chubby may not look like a revolution, but it is approaching one. Compared with the five-figure prices attached to 3-D-printed furniture a decade ago — pieces that took hours, if not days, to produce — Mr. Vander Kooij’s work is snappy and affordable. And it doesn’t have the brittle, ethereal quality of early 3-D printing. He drives home this point on his Web site, where he describes Chubby as: “precise as toothpaste. Heavy like oak.”

In another wing of the Javits show, Massan Dembélé, a master weaver from Burkina Faso, sat at a loom constructed from logs bound with twine and wove handspun cotton cloth decorated with West African totems, part of a program organized by the nonprofit British European Design Group to assist artisans in making goods for export. Mr. Dembélé operated the loom with his bare feet and wove his crocodiles and fish from patterns embedded in his brain.

Craft and small-batch production are ripe to produce something new as well. Though artisanship is often touted as an antidote to digital culture, Mr. Vander Kooij and Mr. Dembélé are more alike than different. Both men control the fabrication process, and that’s no small thing. With the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh renewing concerns about remote factory conditions, there is added value to the idea of designers producing locally and autonomously.

The furniture fair and the coterie of New York design week events offer a stage for such efforts. This year, for example, Wanted Design in Chelsea presented “The Carrot Concept,” a show of furniture produced in El Salvador by local designers, architects and entrepreneurs, working with Jerry Helling, the president and creative director of the American furniture company Bernhardt.

And though conceptual depth was rare, this design week did offer some of it, as when students of the Products of Design M.F.A. program at the School of Visual Arts appeared at Wanted Design with tools that helped visitors think more deeply about objects. A digital microscope, for instance, magnified surfaces 170 times to expose an alien world of beauty and order within everyday materials. In a related project, a series of brief recorded messages purported to express the viewpoints of the items on display.

Startling design innovation often follows material innovation. Nothing extraordinary happened on this front, either, but it is always enjoyable to watch designers at play.

At the Javits, John Eric Byers, a furniture maker, displayed gouged hardwood pieces that he painted and lacquered the color of sable and accented with 24-karat gold. At Wanted Design, Sinje Ollen, a knitter whose needles never left her hands while she chatted, showed an Egg chair by Arne Jacobsen sheathed in bumpy emerald green wool and a modular rug made of zipped strips of knitted fabric. At “NoHo Next,” a show of young designers’ work curated by the organizers of the three-year-old NoHo Design District, Souda from Brooklyn displayed textured, irregularly shaped porcelain vessels cast from leather molds. At Collective .1, a new design show on a Hudson River pier, Kyle DeWoody’s Grey Area gallery included work by Scott Campbell, a tattoo artist: fragrant wood panels burned with ornate patterns. And at BKLYN Designs, which returned to Dumbo after a hiatus, John Randall of Bien Hecho in the Navy Yard offered a water cooler shingled with wood from a New York City water tower.

All these events were staged under the new moniker NYCxDesign (pronounced “NYC by Design”). An initiative of City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, this 12-day assortment of some 200 activities covered all five boroughs and touched various design disciplines, from graphics to jewelry to architecture. The mission, Ms. Quinn has said, is to create jobs in these industries while attracting visitors to New York, much as they flock to the city for Fashion Week.

In its first year, NYCxDesign was mainly a marketing campaign, providing street banners, a Web site with listings, a scheduling app and a presence on digital billboards in Times Square. Designers should be grateful for that much. Design doesn’t get out and strut around like fashion, and it needs more visibility. Milan comes alive when design is celebrated, but New York design week gets lost in the urban shuffle.

As long as people can get past the confounding abbreviation, NYCxDesign is poised to help both design and the economy. Now that the festival is over, Ms. Quinn said, the Economic Development Corporation is studying its economic success and growth potential. She added that she is confident the initiative will continue and hopes she will be around to lead it, something that depends on the success of her mayoral candidacy.

“Whoever the next mayor is, they’ll have NYCxDesign,” she added. “There’s no question in my mind.”

George Lindemann Captures Frieze

 

George with Rob Pruitt, who’s signing The Last Panda T-Shirt

The second edition of Frieze has come and gone, but so long as the tent is still up on Randall’s Island, we’re still enjoying looking back on the art and design filled week, anchored by that fantastic fair.

George Lindemann—a great collector of design and art and President of the Bass Museum’s Board—shares his impressions of Frieze, the inaugural Collective design fair and a few auctions and gallery openings in between.

Gerhard Richter in front of one of his works at Frieze.

Tom Friedman at Luhring Augustine at Frieze

Jeff Koons at Sotheby’s

More Koons at Sotheby’s

Kusama chess set!

Playwright Edward Albee at the Half Gallery opening

At Collective, a desk by Wendell Castle

A necklace by Ugo Rondinone

At the opening of Maria Pergay’s new show at Demisch Danant

Amy Cappellazzo at Christie’s with a work by Ruth Asawa

Dan Colen at Sotheby’s

Anish Kapoor Strikes While Hot

The English sculptor on today's art boom and tilting his Berlin retrospective toward the future

 By MARY M. LANE