Funky Find Of The Week: The Whippet Bench by Radi Designers

above : The Whippet Bench


above: Resin Lacquered Whippet Bench


above: Solid Revolution Resin Whippet Bench (residing outside a Tokyo bank).


Product information: “whippet” bench, 2000 by radi designers

Producer: Galerie Kreo (buy it here)
Limited edition of 30 pieces and 5 Artist's proofs. - Numbered & signed pieces
Lacquered resin - various colors
Dimensions: Depth: 29,1 inches (74 cm), Length: 59 inches (150 cm), Height: 23 inches (58,5 cm)

Radi Designers

The World's Most Expensive Teddy:125 Carat Bear from Steiff

The German teddy bear company, Steiff is responsible for the production many expensive collectible bears and also the most expensive teddy bear ever made. The Steiff company claims to have made the world’s first teddy bear and is has made this golden bear to commemorate its 125th anniversary.

The expensive bear has a mouth made of solid gold and fur made from gold thread. Topping off the teddy bear are jeweled eyes featuring sapphire pupils with diamond irises.



If you or your spoiled daughter simply “must have” the world’s most expensive teddy bear, you might have to search hard for the purchase. Only 125 of the collectible edition bears were produced, making them not just hard to afford, but also hard to find.

These bears came with a price tag of 62,446 Euros (about $84,000 USD). But you don’t have to empty your bank account just yet, Steiff toys makes a wide variety of teddy bears that are more affordable than anniversary edition and will still make you feel like a teddy bear connoisseur.

UPDATE: Now with his own diamond-studded toy elephant and other goodies.






Buy him here.

Artists Design Bags for Fair Trade. Auction & Exhibit next week!

Bags of Goodwill

twentytwentyone are honoured to launch Bags of Goodwill, an exhibition and auction to raise awareness and funds for the Fairtrade Foundation.

Bags of Goodwill will show one-off creations by 40 world-renowned designers during London Design Festival. 19-25 September. To be held at our River Street showroom, the event is being generously supported by Cappellini.

The unique bags will be available to purchase via sealed bid. The highest bidder will be contacted at the close of the exhibition, with all monies going to the Fairtrade Foundation.

Ross Lovegrove, below left: Eero Aarnio, below right:



The unique bags will be available to purchase via sealed bid.

We have approached important international furniture and product designers to customise or create a design directly onto twentytwentyone's cotton tote shopping bag. The only consideration being that their design reflects their philosophy towards design and makes a consideration towards responsible design.

The entire exhibition will be available to view online from 19 September 2007.
It will also be on display at the:

twentytwentyone showroom from the 19 - 25 September from 10am - 5pm. (12pm - 5 pm on Sunday 23 September).

The following designers have committed to the project; Alexander Taylor, Alfredo Haeberli, Andrew Stafford, Arik Levy, Barber Osgerby, Claesson Kovisto Rune, Damian Williamson, Doshi Levien, Eero Aarnio, El Ultimo Grito, Ella Doran, Enzo Mari, Gijs Bakker, Gitta Gschwendtner, Giulio Cappellini, Harri Koskinen, Ineke Hans, Jasper Morrison, Jerszy Seymour, Kenneth Grange, Konstantin Grcic, Lucienne Day, Marcel Wanders, Mark Holmes, Matthew Hilton, Michael Marriott, Michael Sodeau, Michael Young, Naoto Fukasawa, Noways Says, Patrick Norguet, Pearson Lloyd, Robin Day, Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Ross Lovegrove, Sam Hecht & Kim Collin, Sebastian Wrong, Shin Azumi, Tom Dixon, Tomoko Azumi, Tord Boonjte.

Robin Day: Kenneth Grange:


Shin Azumi: Marcel Wanders:


El Ultimo Grito: Sam Hecht & Kim Collin:


Bids may be accepted until midnight on the 25th September via goodwill@twentytwentyone.com.

If you would like to receive a reply email notification at the launch of the online exhibition please email goodwill@twentytwentyone.com with the word launch in the subject line.

twentytwentyone wanted to move away from using polythene shop-bags and have sourced a manufacturer to produce Fairtrade and organic certified cotton bag. We consider the bags to be a perfect blank canvas and envisaged a series of commissioned designs to reflect the activities of twentytwentyone. The idea for an auction to raise money for charity was borne out of this concept.

19-25 September

Bags of Goodwill
twentytwentyone
18cRiver St
London EC1R 1XN

Limited Edition Marc Jacob Exclusives At Colette

- Following the success of Little Marc - his line of clothes for children - Marc Jacobs has created the Little Marc Box - the perfect gift to mark the arrival of any newborn - pyjamas in pink or claret with a Be@rbrick Medicom Toy. This limited-edition toy (only 1000 made) is availalbe in turquoise or bronze an is only available in a pre-release exclusive chez colette from August 27.



- Exclusive to Colette and available in the eshop from August 22 (official release date September 5), the documentary "Louis Vuitton & Marc Jacobs" reveals the Louis Vuitton's backstage and its artistic director Marc Jacobs.

The DVD contains more than an hour of special extras (including New York party, a Marc Jacobs press conference in Tokyo, the large model Bracque bag and a visit to the factory). A documentary directed by Loïc Prigent, based on an idea by Dominique Miceli, 2007- 82min, Arte Video

Black Is Back (But Limited).

After years of silver, titanium and aluminum, black is back...and in several limited editions.

Here are a few of the hippest black limited editions of some fun items.


Above: Flos' Miss K lamp in black
available here.


Above: Philippe Starck's Gnome Stool in black
available here.


Above: Chevy's Limited Edition Black HHR due out this fall
read about it here.


Above: Chanel's Limited Edition Black Satin nail polish
Get it here.


Above: the Xbox 360 in black
read about it here.


Above: The Takamine 2007 Limited Edition The Storm Acoustic-Electric Cutaway
get it here.


Above: David Horvath's ultra hip Ugly Dolls, now in black
available here.

even black toilet paper.....


Now available at wishingfish.com


Above: Tom Ford's Limited Edition "Black Orchid" perfume
Only available here.

Can't Afford To Spend 100 Million Bucks? How About $10,000?

A few weeks ago, Damian Hirst's latest creation graced the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine (as well as getting coverage on many a blog). The subject was his latest creation, the world's most expensive piece of art. A life sized platinum skull set with diamonds.

This article reprinted below by William Shaw accompanied the piece:

It’s particularly fitting that the title of Damien Hirst’s new headline-grabbing work came from an exasperated exclamation of his mother’s: “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?”

The answer, pictured here, is a life-size platinum skull set with 8,601 high-quality diamonds. If, as expected, it sells for around $100 million this month, it will become the single most expensive piece of contemporary art ever created. Or the most outrageous piece of bling.

At home in Devon, Hirst insists it’s absolutely the former. “I was very worried for a while, because if it looked like bling — tacky, garish and over the top — we would have failed. But I’m very pleased with the end result. I think it’s ethereal and timeless.”

For Hirst, famous pickler of sharks and bovine bisector, all his art is about death. This piece, which was cast from an 18th-century skull he bought in London, was influenced by Mexican skulls encrusted in turquoise. “I remember thinking it would be great to do a diamond one — but just prohibitively expensive,” he recalls. “Then I started to think — maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.”

The dazzle of the diamonds might outshine any meaning Hirst attaches to it, and that could be a problem. Its value as jewelry alone is preposterous. Hirst, who financed the piece himself, watched for months as the price of international diamonds rose while the Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner tried to corner the market for the artist’s benefit. Given the ongoing controversy over blood diamonds from Africa, “For the Love of God” now has the potential to be about death in a more literal way.

“That’s when you stop laughing,” Hirst says. “You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”

The piece is not exactly the stuff of public art, but Hirst says he hopes that an institution like the British Museum might put it on display for a while before it disappears into a vault, never to be seen again. Whether the piece is seen or not, Hirst will likely go down in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most extravagant artist.

“I hadn’t thought about that!” he suddenly snorts with laughter. “I deal with that with all my work. The markup on paint and canvas is a hell of a lot more than on this diamond piece.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At the going rate of 100 million dollars, chances are you won't be buying it.

But now, a London gallery is selling limited edition prints of this piece, still pricey at 10,000+ USD, but a mere pittance compared to $100,000,000.00

In conjunction with Damien Hirst’s exhibition ‘Beyond Belief’, White Cube Gallery announce the release of eight new limited edition works.

These works include a series of silkscreens depicting Hirst’s extraordinary diamond skull ‘For the Love of God’, a life-size cast of a human skull in platinum, covered entirely by 8,601 VVS to flawless pavé-set diamonds. In addition to these silkscreens there are three works on canvas, each with paracetamol pills and syringes. These relate closely to the new series of ‘Fact’ and ‘Biopsy’ paintings which focus upon issues surrounding Western medicine, and continue Hirst’s long standing interest in the themes of life and death.





Want one of your own? Click here

A little about DAMIAN HIRST:
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965. While still a student at Goldsmith's College in 1988, he curated the now renowned student exhibition, Freeze, held in east London. In this exhibition, Hirst brought together a group of young artists who would come to define cutting-edge contemporary art in the 1990s. In 1991, he had his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery, entitled In and Out of Love, in which he filled the gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies, some of which were hatched from the monochrome canvases that hung the walls. In 1992, he was part of the ground breaking Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. In this show, he exhibited his now famous Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. That same year he was nominated for the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize, and later won that coveted award in 1995.

Hirst's best known works are his paintings, medicine cabinet sculptures, and glass tank installations. For the most part, his paintings have taken on two styles. One is an arrangement of color spots with titles that refer to pharmaceutical chemicals, known as Spot paintings. The second, his Spin paintings, are created by centrifugal force, when Hirst places his canvases on a spinner, and pours the paint as they spin. In the medicine cabinet pieces Hirst redefines sculpture with his arrangements of various drugs, surgical tools, and medical supplies. His tank pieces, which contain dead animals, that are preserved in formaldehyde, are another kind of sculpture and directly address the inevitable mortality of all living beings. All of Hirst's works contain his ironic wit, and question art's role in contemporary culture.

Hirst's first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery, entitled No Sense of Absolute Corruption, was in 1996 at the now-closed SoHo location in New York. Superstition is Damien Hirst's first show at the Beverly Hills space.

For the Official Damien Hirst Website, click here.

Funky Find of The Week: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea designed by Paolo Orsacchini

Here's the fantastic new Italian limited commemorative edition of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea designed by Paolo Orsacchini. It's printed on waterproof paper and enclosed in a clear pouch filled with real sea water. Collectors can either bust it out of its original packaging, dry it under the sun, and enjoy a classic read, or they can preserve this limited piece in all its designed glory.

Unfortunately I cannot find if it's available for purchase, so you'll simply have to marvel at the concept for now.

Product Pick Of The Week: The Good Vs. Evil Foosball Table

I really never thought of Foosball as a high-end sport. My personal Foosball experience consists of seeing a Foosball table grace the main room of every fraternity house at UC Berkeley, the rec rooms of most families in Marin County (where I grew up) and got lots of recognition as a staple in Joey and Chandler's kitchen on the ever popular sitcom, Friends.



But Eleven Forty doesn't make ordinary Foosball tables. Uh uh. They have created The Opus.
Every detail is thought out. Each table is hand crafted with etched glass, stainless steel and assorted exotic woods. Utilizing computer technology, precision engineering and innovative construction, it has transformed a recreational game into a piece of functional art.



Here are a few pics of the hand crafted details:








Now, as if it weren't enough to create such a beautiful 'game', as an owner you are treated to amazing service from Forty Eleven.


And, if you thought all that was cool, check out their coup de grace, The Good Vs. Evil Edition. This is a limited edition “opus football table” by Eleven Forty for the super exclusive 20LTD. Only 20 were made and it retails for 14,500 pounds.




The Team of Evil XI consists of: Pot (as in Pol Pot), Lucifer (you know...Satan), Caligula, Ripper (as in Jack), Impaler (as in Vlad the), Hitler, Macbeth (as in Lady), Hyde (the darker side of Dr, Jekyll), Klebb (as in Rosa), Idi Amin, Catcher (as in the Child).

Playing for Good XI : Claus (as in Santa), More (as in Sir Thomas), Moore (as in Bobby), Gordon (as in Flash), Robin (as in Christopher), God, Assisi (the saint), Jekyll (The lighter side of Mr. Hyde), Mary Poppins, Mother Teresa, M.K. Gandhi.





I can't think of a more fun way to pit Ghandi against Hitler, can you?

Order your own Opus Table by clicking here.
Or get the Good vs. Evil edition by clicking here.


•Be sure to check out all of these amazing foosball tables by Bronzini and Teckell