Interview

HADEN-GUEST: What interests me is this: If you go around a fair like Art Basel, there’s a certain amount of boring art—

ARAD: Shall we say 95 percent? Okay?

HADEN-GUEST: Okay. Call it avant-garde salon art. But there’s only 5 percent of really horrible art. Design fairs have some pieces that are really wonderful, but the proportion of bad stuff, it seems to me, is much higher than in art fairs.

ARAD: Well, maybe. Because it’s like with every new bandwagon. You know, there were lots of bad cubist paintings. I mean, there was Braque, Picasso, Gris . . . And then there was a cubist painter in every capital of the world. In every movement you have the people who are real, and you have the people who join in. People are joining in, in a big, big way.

HADEN-GUEST: You’re talking about design art?

ARAD: I’m talking about . . . In every movement, whether you like it or not, at the end of the day it’s about individuals; it’s not about movements. I enjoy doing things for the industry. The thing that I don’t enjoy is that you have to convince people—they have to be convinced. And I’m not into designing just anything. For me, to design something is to do something that was not there before I did it. It gives me . . . I don’t know if you know this PizzaKobra light? [ARAD spins behind my chair to a nearby desk, and returns cradling a flat blackish disk, made from a coil, like an old-fashioned firelighter.]

HADEN-GUEST: Huh?

ARAD: This thing here is made by iGuzzini, who normally make architectural lighting. This is the first consumer good that they did, and I designed it. It’s called the PizzaKobra light. When it’s off, the red light is on to tell you where the button is. You know, one of the world’s greatest collectors told me off for doing thousands of them. He said, “You should only do 10!” No! This is for thousands. And hundreds of thousands! [A female assistant has joined us.]

ASSISTANT: A collector always wants you to do the small quantities. But you want to do the largest quantities.

ARAD: He really told me off! He was fuming. You know Rolf Fehlbaum from Vitra? He’s another great collector, a great industrialist. And he says, as an industrialist, he’s interested in success. But as a collector, he’s only interested in failures. There’s no point in him collecting one of the greatest chairs, the [Arne] Jacobsen “Egg” armchair. But the chairs that Jacobsen did that didn’t make it into production are collected.

HADEN-GUEST: You have no problem showing at art fairs. Last year you showed at Frieze with the Timothy Taylor Gallery. You are the first quote-unquote designer who Tim Taylor has taken on.

ARAD: Before that, I showed at Frieze with the German gallery Jablonka. Again, Frieze wasn’t exactly happy to begin with. But then it was a very successful stand. And very much written about. So, because I exhibited with David LaChapelle, they started complaining not about me, but about David LaChapelle. Why? Because he also does commercials, probably. But that doesn’t disqualify him from doing what he does as well, which is photography that is a lot more interesting than a lot of people who don’t get their hands dirty and don’t do videos for
Elton John. But let’s look at what he does—not disqualify him from what he can do very well and very successfully.

HADEN-GUEST: Helmut Newton’s work came out of commercial assignments.

ARAD: Well, Helmut Newton is someone they had problems with. More than they had with Cindy Sherman. [Abrupt subject change. ARAD picks up a volume and hands it to me.] Do you know about this? [It’s a Sotheby’s catalog. I examine it.]

HADEN-GUEST: No, I don’t. This is . . . [I see that it is the catalog for Sotheby’s “Beyond Limits” sculpture show at the Duke of Devonshire’s country house, Chatsworth. It has already opened.] It’s happened. It’s opened. Am I being very stupid?

ARAD: No, no. It opened. I had a very good time there the year before. I showed the Thumbprint that I showed in Milan. And this time when they asked for a piece, I said I would do two pieces. One would be the negative of the other. So they will be identical. The only thing that’s different is that one will have the holes and one will have the gaps between the holes. I didn’t need to invent a new sofa. I could use one of my old ones. Because it wasn’t about being a new thing. It was about what things are made of. It was like zooming in on something and seeing all the particles big. But the frame stayed the same. So it’s like when you zoom your camera. The frame of the camera stays the same. So I’ll just show you the development of these things. The name of this work is Even the Oddballs? because it reflects negative and positive. I told Sotheby’s there’s no way we are going to have the pieces ready for the photography at Chatsworth for the catalog. So we did a composite. We took stainless steel chairs and photographed them at Chatsworth to get the reflection. And this image is a composite of rendering and modeling.