Frank Gehry is designing mini-sculptures in the form of… jewelry! Can’t buy a Frank Gehry-designed house? Fret no more! For only $12,500, you can get an 18k gold Gehry-designed bracelet and get your haute-design fix. The cuff bracelet in question is inspired by a building he designed for one of his clients in Paris and, in fact, most of his jewelry items will be ideas absorbed from his own architecture projects as well as other artists’ creations (e.g., Wassily Kandinsky and other Abstract Expressionists). But if $12,000 is still over your price range, several of his sterling pieces are around $100. How does this 80-year-old juggle it all? He’s also working on designing the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi and on a collaboration of sorts with major tennis player Maria Sharapova—an arrangement between Tiffany’s and the model/tennis player where she wears Tiffany jewelry during four tournaments. Sharapova is working with Gehry to design a pair of earrings that would potentially sit perfectly on her ear during the action of a tennis game. According to Art News, it was all his idea to take up jewelry design and Tiffany’s was a willing sponsor. “All this luxury raises the question: Does Gehry make a lot of money from the venture? ‘It's not about that,’ the architect said. ‘It all goes into a trust to do some good someday.”
Just for the record, Kandinsky was an abstractionist, and started his career in the vein of German Expressionism, but he was never an Abstract Expressionist (post WWII American art movement). Confusing, I know, since art historians as a group aren't always great at naming movements and periods (the whole "modern" v. "contemporary" thing, for instance).
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