Murray Moss Goes Butch

"Butch-Craft," according to Murray Moss, the visionary behind SoHo's legendary design emporium Moss, is a term he invented to articulate the design-world's current obsession with the "rough-hewn, virile, reductive, anti-academic, craft-driven, 'tool-belt and heavy-lifting' aesthetic, paradoxically realized with such sensitivity and finesse, often embodying subtle, complex theoretical, structural, formal, and compositional aspects." To this end, he's curating a show at his store, "MAKE ME," that opens on Sept. 15, featuring chairs that look like chairs, tables that look like tables; "Works, both past and present, that overtly resemble 'furniture', executed in wood and iron and steel and stone." Channeling his inner Malcolm Gladwell, Moss acknowledges a tipping point in design, "where art-in-design no longer needs to look like what we recognize as Art; art-in-design no longer needs to wear its art on its sleeve." So check it out, all you rough-hewn, virile, reductive, anti-academic types!