I saw a young man at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) ride a bike through it, and it struck me that he had exactly the right idea. This year’s show is significantly smaller than it’s been in previous years, but it still fills the entire lower level of the Javitz Center. The show is usually fun to walk through, and each new booth has the potential to surprise and delight. But this year I spent just an hour on the floor and then took a seat while my friend finished her viewing. The show felt like an endless array of the same handful of products: artisinal wood tables, artisinal hand-blown glass lamps, and artisinal wallcoverings.
I’m all for a return to craft, sustainable materials, and small-scale fabrication. But most of the artisinal-minded products at ICFF are too obsessively designed and machined to be authentically artisinal, or even artsy. Their one-off hand-finished look is just an aesthetic. It’s obvious that behind the reclaimed materials and artfully irregular finishes, highly ambitious trained designers (frustrated architects, perhaps?) are at work. The rage for handmade stuff has already been parodied, lovingly, by the iconic Put a Bird On it! skit on Portlandia. What’s the limit to the number of artisinal products the market can bear? Isn’t it just a matter of time before the sensibility, like all other trends, falls out of fashion?