friday photo

Fendi handbags customized by artists Richard Prince (top) and KAWS (bottom) for Christie’s Green Auction: Bid to Save the Earth.

Earth Day is still a few weeks away, but Christie’s got the planet-saving off to an early start on Tuesday. The auction house partnered with Runway to Green to hold A Bid to Save the Earth, an auction and fashion show extravaganza that raised $1.4 million to benefit Conservation International, Oceana, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Central Park Conservancy. Although it’s too late to enter the paddle battle for lots such as the opportunity to spend a day with President Bill Clinton (one of the sale’s top lots, that went for $100,000), the companion online auction is open through Thursday, April 7. We’ve got our eye on the Fendi baguettes customized by artists including KAWS, Damien Hirst (who created one spin-art version and another covered in rows of candy-colored LSD dots), Andisheh Avini, and Enoc Perez. Richard Prince picked up a marker and jotted a corny joke on his canvas and leather version, while Tom Sachs went for pyro-chic and torched his baguette into oblivion. If it’s fashionable experiences you’re in the market for, bid on runway show tickets and shopping sprees from the likes of Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, and Vera Wang or splurge on meet and greets with Oprah Winfrey, Justin Bieber, and John McEnroe, whose one-hour tennis lesson has already reached $26,000.

What if a loveseat wanted a divorce? We imagine the results would look something like Sebastian Brajkovic‘s “Lathe VIII” chair, a pair of grey-coated bronze chairs conjoined by a blur of silk upholstery. The Amsterdam-based designer created the chair in 2008 as part of a series that began as his graduation project at Design Academy, Eindhoven (he graduated all right, and landed a coveted internship at Studio Makkink Bey) and was inspired in part by the tools of graphic designers. “[The] extruding idea came from a Photoshop function where you can pick a row of pixels and extend them as long as you want,” Brajkovic has said. A closer look at the chair reveals a patina of nitric acid scars and needle-stitched embroidery of hippopotamuses and wildebeasts. The competition for this contemporary design icon (one of a limited edition of eight chairs entered the permanent collection of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum only months after it was created) is expected to be just as wild on April 7, when a “Lathe VIII” goes on the block at Phillips de Pury in London. It is estimated to sell for between £40,000 to £60,000 (roughly $65,000 to $95,000, at current exchange).

Eadweard Muybridge, Cockatoo; flying. Plate 759, 1887; collotype; Corcoran Gallery of Art

Two of our favorite things—Moluccan cockatoos and the pioneering photographs of Eadweard Muybridge—come together in today’s Friday Photo, an 1887 collotype that is on view through June 7 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of “Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change.” The blockbuster exhibition, which takes its name from the sunny pseudonym that Muybridge used in the late 1860s, includes more than 300 objects created between 1857 and 1893, including his only surviving zoopraxiscope—an apparatus he designed to project motion pictures. Curator Philip Brookman of the Corcoran Gallery of Art brought together works from 38 different collections, ranging from Muybridge’s photographs of Yosemite Valley and images of Alaska and the Pacific coast to his 1869 survey of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads and breathtaking pictures from Panama and Guatemala that reveal his architectural and landscape photography chops (a successful survey photographer, he also worked as a war correspondent). In this doozy from his Animal Locomotion series of stop-motion photographs, Muybridge captured 24 frames worth of a cockatoo in flight. It’s up to you to imagine the bird’s peachy feathers and jaunty salmon crest.

Courtesy Stephen Kling

Between 2003 and 2010, Stephen Kling (at left) created hundreds of covers for The Nation, the left-of-center weekly helmed by Katrina vanden Heuvel. On Wednesday or Thursday of any given week, he would be given a cover story, usually a sprawling ideas piece slugged “Headline TK.” His mission? To translate the story, whether a prescription for dealing with mendacious chief executives or an exposé on resurgent nationalism in Iraq, into a provacative-but-not-too-provocative visual—by Friday. He succeeded by thinking (and working) fast and drawing upon his arsenal of textures, flags, hands, drips, and smears. When stock photo libraries came up short, he grabbed his digital camera and got shooting.

Klinger recently created a website that displays highlights of his Nation covers and the stories behind them. A special section is devoted to cover designs that didn’t make the cut (Sarah Palin as a sled dog, a drop of blood on a Wall Streeter’s wingtip), but when we asked him to name his favorite Nation creation, he pointed not to a cover but to the Christmas card he created for the magazine in 2006. “It just happened one day, entirely unplanned, as I was goofing around with some hokey old photos—George W. Bush was in a dirndl, in Dick Cheney‘s arms,” Klinger told us. “I showed it to the circulation director of The Nation, who immediately decided to scrap the usual Christmas subscription premium and use it instead.” These days, between designing publications for pharmaceutical companies and pitching other magazines, Klinger is writing and filming a documentary about art direction. He’s also taking steps to avoid digital overload. “I’m rediscovering old-fashioned analog photography in my new darkroom.”

(Photo: New York Public Library)

WWD has confirmed our exclusive report of Chanel’s imminent pop-up shop partnership with Paris boutique Colette. The temporary store, opening Tuesday in a former garage on Rue Saint Honoré, will stock items ranging from gritty (graffiti-covered handbags, scooter helmets) to glam (spring looks from Chanel, Eres maillots) as well as a few extraspecial offerings, including nimble-fingered Lemarié craftspeople demonstrating how to create a camellia (house artisans supply Chanel with approximately 20,000 of the blooms each year). Book that Air France flight tout suite, because the shop is only open for ten days. All of which brings us to our Friday Photo: the dust jacket for Paris Is a Woman’s Town, a 1929 lady’s guide to the City of Light written by Helen Josephy and Mary Margaret McBride, described on the inside flap as “well-known newspaper women.” The worldly pair, who may or not have resembled the rather stout figures depicted on their book’s cover, dispense plenty of advice for the Paris-bound, as “the average woman on her first trip is abashed and even frightened by the unfamiliar language and scenes about her.” Lesson one: watch out for that evil-looking guy with the cane!

(Photo: Christie’s)

On Wednesday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens an exhibition devoted to renowned guitar craftsmen, and a few days later, the Museum of Modern Art will unveil “Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914.” Ever the market timer, Damien Hirst is all over the art-guitars moment, and for a good cause. His 2010 “Beautiful Charity Spin Guitar” (pictured) goes on the block next Thursday, February 17, in London during Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale. The manufacturer, Ontario-based Carparelli, provided the wooden semi-acoustic guitar—a Scarborough Nine—to which Hirst applied his signature spin painting and then donated to War Child, an international humanitarian organization. Proceeds from the sale of the guitar will support War Child’s work with children affected by conflict. Christie’s estimates that it will sell for between £30,000 and £50,000, or $48,420 to $80,700 at current exchange.

(Photos: Paul Kasmin Gallery)

Record snowfalls have turned New York City into a pure white canvas for Will Ryman‘s bright pink and red rose sculptures, now in full bloom along Park Avenue between 57th and 67th Streets. The writer turned artist (who, as the son of Robert Ryman, knows a little something about all-white surfaces) created the monumental flowers as a kind of tribute to his hometown. “With these roses I wanted to do something that was larger than life and site-specific,” he said in a statement. “In my work I always try to combine fantasy with reality. In the case of ‘The Roses,’ I tried to convey New York City’s larger than life qualities through scale; creating blossoms which are imposing, humorous, and hopefully beautiful.”

For this, his first public art exhibition, Ryman used stainless steel, yacht-grade fiberglass resin, and automotive paint to create 38 giant pink and red roses that range in height from three to 25 feet. Each of the eight sturdy clusters harbors a similarly outsized brass ladybug, aphid, beetle, or bee. Meanwhile, melting snow will reveal 20 accompanying sculptures of individual rose petals, which have been “scattered” (as much as steel slabs can be) along the Park Avenue Mall between 63rd and 65th Streets. We suggest a Valentine’s Day stroll, “he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not”-style. On view until real buds can take over on June 1, “The Roses” is presented jointly by Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City’s Department of Parks & Recreation, and the Fund for the Park Avenue Sculpture Committee.

(Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Before rollerblades were even a twinkle in our eye, frog design was redefining the roller skate. We discovered these “Frollerskates” (pictured) in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which acquired them as a gift from frog in 1988. With a ski boot-style outer shell of hard polyurethane and a removable leather inner shoe, these “marvels of high-tech design” were the talk of Popular Mechanics in December 1987, just as Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s Starlight Express was racing across the Broadway stage. Oddly, the magazine made no mention of frog, describing the $99 Frollerskates as “imported from Switzerland by The Sharper Image, of San Francisco.” The magazine was particularly impressed by the skates’ independent wheel mountings. “Most skates connect front and back wheels to a plate of metal or hard plastic,” wrote Joseph Skorupa, who held the enviable title of “outdoors editor” at Popular Mechanics, and Dennis Burnside. “Frollerskates mold the truck mountings into the rigid boot shell, eliminating the need for extra support. The result is a sleek, ultra-modern design well-suited to free-spirited, modern skaters.”

(Photos: Diane Bondareff)

Don’t you dare call it a dessert. Artist Marina Abramovic has transformed the good ‘ol Baked Alaska into “a multisensory culinary intervention” now thrilling more adventurous diners at New York’s Park Avenue, the AvroKO-designed restaurant that overhauls everything from its menu and wine list to its interiors and name with the seasons. Executive chef Kevin Lasko (at far left) collaborated on the food experience, “Volcano Flambé,” which includes an exclusive take-away collection of Abramovic’s Spirit Cooking Menus, a recorded reading by the artist guiding diners (who use the headphones and digital audio device placed at their seats in wintry bleached-wood boxes) through the experience of the dish through sound, and the decadent dessert itself, set ablaze as it is served. We hear that the fiery treat is a journey through sensory contrasts: hot and cold, soft and hard, dark and light, sweet and savory. The project came about thanks to Creative Time, and the organization hopes that restaurant patrons have an appetite for more artist-chef collaborations. Janine Antoni, Paul Ramirez Jonas, and Michael Rakowitz will debut their delicious works, also whipped up with Lasko, later this year. Meanwhile, Abramovic’s Volcano Flambé will be available at Park Avenue Winter through March 20. And the best part? You don’t even have to stare her down for the last bite.

(Courtesy Bergdorf Goodman)

When it comes to holiday window displays, some stores go for wit, others for classic Christmas cheer, and a few just cover their usual merch with a dusting of faux snow and call it a (holi)day. Meanwhile, New York’s Bergdorf Goodman pulls out all the stops with windows that look like they sprung from the fever dreams of Salvador Dali after a luxury shopping spree. This year is no exception. The store’s 2010 windows are inspired by fantasy travel and feature modes of transport that range from an antique caboose (manned by a conductor in Oscar de la Renta) and well-stocked sailing ship to a gold and ivory wooden pegasus and a hot air balloon piloted by a team of dapper monkeys (here’s hoping it sparks a contemporary craze for singerie). “We are in the surprise business,” said David Hoey, Bergdorf Goodman’s senior director of visual presentation and window design, who describes his job as “part architect and part cake decorator.” The Bergdorf Goodman holiday windows will remain on display through January 3, but we suggest taking a closer look at your leisure with Windows at Bergdorf Goodman (Assouline), a limited-edition tome that documents a decade of Bergdorf’s spectacular windows through 55 photographs and more than 100 illustrations.