Riff on This

Annie Block, Mark McMenamin, and Meghan Edwards -- Interior Design, 5/1/2010 12:00:00 AM

Don't see a connection between the birds and the bass? Musician, composer, and artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot does, and his recent installation at London's Barbican Centre is proof. In The Curve, zebra finches perch on such iconic electric guitars as Gibson's Les Paul.

 
In cubist art by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, guitars appear almost as often as newspapers and tobacco pipes. "Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," running at the New York institution through August 1, makes that point with just a single work, the mixed-media Guitar and Clarinet on a Mantelpiece from 1915.The indie music scene inspired Rocket, a furniture company founded by Marco Fanelli and Luca Bregoli. Its debut at Milan's Salone Internazionale del Mobile included not only headphone-shape napkin rings and turntable-esque trays but also the Rocks cocktail table, its unmistakable acrylic silhouette supported by aluminum posts.

At the Musical Instrument Museum, which just opened in Phoenix, 12,000 instruments band together. The 190,000-square-foot, limestone-clad building by Richard Varda, Architect, and RSP Architects features five main galleries, one devoted to the unplugged artistry of C.F. Martin & Co.

An umbrella, a book, and, yes, a guitar are among the "everyday" objects providing stimulation to London commuters embarking and disembarking at the Docklands Light Railway's new Woolwich Arsenal station. Michael Craig-Martin screen-printed Street Life on more than 2,500 ceramic tiles surrounding the escalators and staircase.