[00:00:00] Will: Hey Cotter.

[00:00:00] Cotter: Hi.

[00:00:02] Will: So to start this episode, I actually had chatGPT uh, write us a little narrative to set the scene. You ready?

[00:00:11] Cotter: Oh boy. Alright.

[00:00:12] AI narrator: It's a chilly October evening in 1985, and we're weaving through the cobblestone streets of SoHo. Headed to an opening at Art and Industry the legendary gallery where art meets furniture in the most radical sculptural ways. The air is thick with possibility and cigarette smoke. The sidewalks are alive with a mix of fashion rebels, artists, and collectors inside the gallery is already packed.

We spot Keith Haring chatting Animatedly near a lacquered neon accented chair that looks more like a spaceship than a place to sit. Jean-Michel Basquiat slips through the crowd paint still on his jeans while Grace Jones impossibly tall and magnetic poses for a photo under one of Howard Meister Angular steel lamps.

Across the room, Julian Schnabel is talking loudly about broken plates and baroque aesthetics. Everyone's drinking cheap white wine out of plastic cups, and the vibe is wild Half Design revolution, half downtown house party. The line between art and life has never felt thinner.

[00:01:20] Cotter: Get ready.

Wow. Cheap. Do you think, are you sure it was cheap white wine? No,

[00:01:25] Will: actually that was I, you know, it was Chachi pt, not me. So yeah, that seemed a little insulting.

[00:01:31] Cotter: That's wild. And they don't do well with Keith Haring's name, that's for sure.

[00:01:36] Will: No, I tried to get him to say it Right.

Didn't work out.

hopefully that took us, took us back to SoHo in the late. Seventies and the eighties. It was quite a scene. I wish I could have been there,

[00:01:46] Cotter: so today we're gonna talk about art furniture.

art furniture that,it doesn't mean much to me, or didn't, before we kind of got into this episode. My only familiarity was perhaps it arising from Memphis. Yeah.

but you're, you're talking about something here that maybe is similar but came out of that movement, and that's American Art Furniture.

So first of all, I think. It would be helpful to know a little bit more what you mean when you say art furniture. 'cause the term was new to me when we started talking about this. Um, I feel, I understand it better. It's kind of in the name, but what's your like, working definition of art furniture?

[00:02:24] Will: today, so contemporary work, like if you look at Carpenter's workshop gallery, RN company, egg Collective.

Any of these design galleries, they showcase, uh, furniture and design pieces that are really, they're made in the same way that art is made and they can be bought and collected the same way that art is bought and collected.