Texts, lies and a final escape: when contests go bad

A little more than a year ago, I joined up with a company called Metallo Arts to host a give away of a $3200 gift certificate for a Metallo Arts custom range hood. I publicized the contest and Metallo Arts like crazy for the five weeks that the Dream Kitchen contest went on. How it worked was that anybody who wanted to enter had to describe or draw for me their idea of a fantasy kitchen. I wanted people to be impractical and creative, this was an exercise in dreams.

On 3 April 2009, I announced a winner. It was a woman whose fantasy kitchen was based on the designs of a Ukranian Easter Egg. She really threw herself into her idea and what she sent in was a concept even more fully realized than the concept boards I put together for my own clients. Here are a couple of still shots from her entry.

Lisa and her family were gearing up to renovate their kitchen and this range hood was going to make the perfect focal point. They'd have it, use it and love it forever. It was a perfect ending.

My contact at Metallo Arts was Chris Plummer, who was one of the two owners of the company. I connected Lisa to Chris and put everything out of my mind.

Fast forward a couple of months and Metallo Arts dissolved in a flurry of pointed fingers and lawsuits. I don't know any of the particulars and frankly I don't want to know them. I assumed that with the company gone, so was Lisa's hood since they hadn't started making it yet. Chris assured me however, that he was going to form another company and that all of his outstanding orders would be fulfilled by the new company. I believed him.

I corresponded with Lisa from time to time during the months that followed. He would give her the run around and she'd write to me and I 'd hear about it. I'd then write to Chris and he'd tell me that everything was under control.

Aside from a single Tweet to one of his former employees, I had no contact with anybody else from the defunct Metallo Arts. What ever happened with that company had taken a nasty and personal turn and I felt bad about it enough not to ask.

In January I received a bunch of text messages from Chris. He accused me of  "passing along info to people bent on personal vendettas." Interesting.  Once I convinced him that I had done nothing of the sort we texted back and forth a bit. He told me that he had taken on five new partners and had started a new company. I asked him again what he planned to do about Lisa's hood and he responded, "Lisa's hood ships this week."

This was taking place on 17 January 2010, a Sunday evening. On a lark, I shot an e-mail to Lisa and asked her if she'd heard anything about her hood. Lisa responded immediately, "Regarding Chris, I did manage to get in touch with him directly,and he did promise to help me out, but I've been unable to catch him since December."

That was odd since I'd just been given a shipping date a moment before in a text message. I copied Lisa's email into a text message and then sent it to Chris. Silence.

I went back through my archives and I deactivated all the links I had to Metallo Arts. Then upon further reflection I went back and purged around 20 posts that dealt with the contest and Metallo Arts. I deleted them completely. Then I wrote a disclaimer on the top of the last remaining post, the one where I announced the winner. You can read it here.

Yesterday I was forwarded an e-mail from Lisa. The e-mail was from Chris' new assistant. here's the bulk of the message. I left off the opening sentence because it contained the name of Chris' assistant and I don't want to pull in anybody else.

I understand you have contacted our offices about a prize you won through Metallo Arts. As of June, 2009, Christopher Lee Plummer was no longer associated with Metallo Arts.  Shortly after Chris left, the business folded.

Unfortunately, there is no way to collect the prize you won. I am sorry to break this news to you but we do not have any recourse as Metallo Arts no longer exists.  The sole owner of Metallo as of June, 2009 was Sheldon Gruber. You may want to contact him and see if he would be willing to honor his commitment to you.

Please accept our most sincere apologies as we are very sorry that you were impacted negatively by the closing of Metallo Arts.  As a newly formed company, we are not in a position to fulfill Mr. Gruber's obligation.

Isn't that interesting. Lisa's disappointed of course and frankly, it's Chris' prerogative to do whatever he wants. It's the lies and obfuscations that bother me.

I wrote to Chris' assistant and told her that I was writing this column and that it would appear today. I asked her for a statement either from the company or from Chris to run alongside this blog post. I heard from Chris via text message at 7pm. His statement:

Here is my statement hire a good atty...

This whole situation makes me sick to my stomach. I feel awful for Lisa of course but I'm really angry for having been played a fool through all of this. I get it that companies go under but what's the point of lying? This could have been resolved last summer by saying sorry, all bets are off. But that's not what happened. Lisa and her family renovated their kitchen as this has been unfolding and everything's done except for the gaping hole over the range. A hole that was to have been taken up by a custom range hood.

And so ends the year-long saga of the Metallo Arts Fantasy Kitchen Contest. I apologize to Lisa and to anybody else I may have hurt though this. I can't fix it, any of it, and that's what's so bothersome. So be careful when it comes to big ticket items given away on blogs. And bloggers beware anybody offering big tickets items to be used as give aways. Nothing's ever free. Nothing.

Live free, shower free

Here's a couple of shots of a shower by Tetard, Hadiquez and Grisoni (better known as THG) at last month's Maison et Objet éditeurs in Paris. Maison et Objet is a world renowned annual showcase of fantastical house products. Christian May, of the internet's Maison21, is a Maison et Objet  habitué and maybe he'll share with us some insights on his various trips over there if we ask him nicely. Anyhow, back to the shower. Here it is.

I thinks it's glorious and it reminds me of a concept pioneered by Dornbracht, another fixture manufacturer. Dornbracht developed something they call a Free Shower. It's free in the sense that it's not walled off. Here are a couple of Dornbracht's Free Showers.

I love them and I love the idea of showering without standing in a box. But then again I have an exhibitionist streak and the years have been kind to me.

What do you think of the idea of showering without boundaries? Did Dornbracht start something great or impractical? Given the opportunity to install the THG shower shown at the top of this post, would you?

What is art? Part two

So last night I posed a rhetorical question: what is art?

I was thinking about that question because one of my readers and Twitter pals Christine sent me a link to something that made her roll her eyes. She and I tend to roll our eyes at the same things, so she wanted to share this particular eye roll. Before I get too far ahead of myself, Christine Tweets as @pillowthrowdeco. She's also the pillow maker to the stars and you can see her wares at her Etsy store. If you're north of the 49th parallel, she has a store on iCraft.


Anyhow, she sent me a link to a post written by Casa Sugar a couple of years ago. Now Casa Sugar's a great website and she deserves a lot of credit for spurring the conversation she did in her comments when she ran a poll asking what people thought of this lamp by Philippe Starck.

That was one of four Gun Lamps Philippe Starck designed for Flos a couple of years ago. The comments on Casa Sugar were pretty uniformly horrified by the lamp. And based on their comments, they were missing the point Starck was making with that series. A lot of people thought the lamp was glorifying gun violence. They were also laboring under the mistaken idea that this was some readily-available thing.


I suppose it helps to know who Philippe Starck is. 

Philippe Starck is the 61-year-old enfant terrible of the design world. If René Magritte and Salvador Dalí ever got together and made housewares, the result would be something akin to what comes out of the mind of Philippe Starck.


Philippe Starck is an artist in every sense of the word. I define art as a motive as much as an execution. And in my mind, art is the act of an artist observing and interpreting the world he sees. As he interprets the world, he invites me to see the world as he sees it and at the same time, he challenges me to see it for myself. Ponderous definition I know, but it's taken me years to come up with that and that's as streamlined as I can get it.


Anyhow, Starck turns his artist's eye on the world around him and the result is a tumult of shocking, offensive and as often as not, pretty objects.


Here's a handful of them.

He's also an interior designer and an architect. This is a hotel lobby in Argentina.

Amazing. Now back to the gun lamps that offended so many people on Casa Sugar.


Here's the lamp again.

It's plated in 18 karat gold and on the base, it reads Happiness is a Hot Gun.


The shade is black and there are gold crosses on the inside of the shade.

I smell symbolism at work.


Sure enough, in Starck's own words:

Black as colour of death
Crosses of our dead ones
Gold colour as ambition
War weapons; domestic weapons, bedside, table, living room weapons.
Aux Armes everywhere, as an ending...
Happiness is a hot gun...
My intent was to create objects to remind us that our state of well-being is the result of somebody else dying.

Philippe Starck

Hmmm, that doesn't sound like the glorification of gun violence to me.

These Gun Lamps are intended to be art pieces, clearly. And they're priced as such. Despite the misinterpretations, I can't help but think Monsieur Starck got the reaction he was after precisely.

I think they're hilarious. Brilliant even. I can't see me buying them for me, but I'm sort of glad they're out there.

So. Do these lamps work as art? As illumination? As decor? Or do they fail on all counts?

What is art?

Tomorrow, I want to have a discussion about something and in preparation I'm going to pose a question to think about. What is art? Or more accurately, when is art art and when is it something else.

I don't think this painting by Thomas Kincade is art.

But I do think that this spoof of a Kincade painting by Jim Blanchard is.

So what is art? And when does it become art? When does art stop being a craft and what's the difference?

Piss Christ, 

Andres Serrano, 1986

The question is not whether or not you like something. It's easy to dismiss work I don't like as something other than art. My dislike of the work of Thomas Kincade is not what's underneath my dismissal of his stuff.

Red, Orange, Tan and Purple

Mark Rothko, 1949

Guernica

Pablo Picasso, 1937

Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh, 1889

The Luncheon of the Boating Party

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1881

Morning Looking East Over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains

Frederic E. Church, 1848

Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber

Juan Sánchez Cotán, 1602

Ignudo from the Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo Buonaroti, 1512

Illustration from Li Livres dou Santé by Aldobrandino of Siena 

Artist unknown, late 13th century 

The Barberini Faun

Ancient Greek artist unknown, 300, BCE

So what's art?

The terrible ague

Well it took until February, but I've been felled by the Martian death plague that's been sweeping the land. I haven't been sick in ages and I forgot how rotten this feels. The physical part's bad enough, but this thing has sucked out of me every positive thought in head. All is woe.

But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud
And chase the native beauty from his cheek
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meagre as an ague's fit.

Act 3, Scene 4
The Life and Death of King John, William Shakespeare