'Design 2000: Design vs Art', the final part of the series of talks around the 'Ron Arad: Restless' exhibition, was held last week. With Simon de Pury, the Chairman of Phillips de Pury & Company, Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard of Fredrikson Stallard, the dealer Oscar Humphries of Timothy Taylor Gallery, the artist Pae White and as chair Tim Marlow, Director of Exhibitions at White Cube, the talk aimed to examine the extent of the contiguity of the markets for art and design. Though the chair sought to create a false rivalry between the two disciplines, this was something the panel dissolved quickly. The two sets of practictioners highlighted the overlaps between the creative processes and finished product stressing that the main differences lay in the commissioning processes and in the often restrictive nature of the design brief. Of the panellists, the dealer, Oscar Humphries and the auctioneer, Simon de Pury were most revealing about the status and nature of design as commodity in the marketplace. Simon de Pury sought to collapse the disctinction between the two categories, as had his eponymous auction house with their 'Design Art' sales, emphasising not a disciplinary hierarchy but a qualatitive one. That is, he seemed to be saying that both 'good design' and 'good art' may be art, as tautologically all art that is worthy of the name is good and anything that is bad is not art! Oscar Humphries, whilst stressing that 'good design' may aspire to and indeed reach the status of art, underlined the essentially upwardly movement in the hierarchical nature of this aspiration. 

This blurring of the distinction between art and design was brought home, once again, in the large white galleries of Howick Street at the Phillips de Pury 'Design' sale viewing. Having abandoned the moniker 'Design Art' some years ago on the cusp of it threatening to become fashionable, Phillips continues to lead the auction houses in their choice of contemporary pieces and the sale last week was the heir to their 'Design Art' sales. With the large windows and cool white walls of a contemporary art gallery, the pieces within were often sculptural,

sometimes conceptual 

and at times more resembled installation pieces than utilitarian objects...

These contemporary pieces sold well, with the Marcel Wanders crochet chair coming in at £43,250, the Aranda/Lasch Quasi cabinet making £32,450,

more than double the mid-estimate, the Atelier van Lieshout fetching £39,650 and not forgetting the highly conceptual Marcel Baas Where There's Smoke Screen which sold for £16,250.

The undoubted stars of the sale however, though were the early Modernists, Prouve, Perriand and Jeanneret, so it will be interesting to see if this taste for the contemporary conceptual continutes to hold up against the desire to invest in safer, older blue chip designers in the teeth of a recession...