"The Taste-Maker: Murray moss Takes His Store-Cum-Museum to L.A."
Vanity Fair, May 2007
"Did you hear about the fucking chicken?" asks Murray Moss, standing in the middle of his large shop, Moss, the industrial-design Mecca located on Greene Street in the Soho district of Manhattan. I am standing with John Pawson on a snow-covered ridge in Bohemia, three hours outside of Prague, somewhere.
In a matter of weeks, a second Moss is due to open on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles--trumpeted by its owner as "Moss goes to Hollywood." What is causing Murray Moss his momentary distress in SoHo is Paduaner Hahn, a 22-inch-high Meissen porcelain rooster, designed circa 1734 by Johann Joachim Kaendler, the father of European porcelain art. Moss, dressed in a black, single-breasted Brioni suit and a perfectly pressed white shirt, open at the collar, stares at the statue, which is the current star of the gleaming, 7,000-square-foot store and the anchor of Moss's high altar: a 40-foot-long elevated platform that looks like a fashion-show runway, strewn with exquisite furniture and objects.
Franklin Getchell, Moss's business partner and his boyfriend of 33 years, walks over to me. "You know what happened with the chicken?" he asks. "We sold it, and that always gets Murray bent out of shape. He hates when we sell things. Personally, I like it when we sell $16,000 porcelain chickens."
"I hate it," says Moss. "I'd like to be a museum. You don't have to sell anything. No one touches anything. All you do is get grants." He turns to address a team of display assistants--three young men in black T-shirts with the Moss store motto please do not touch--and eventually they settle on a replacement for Paduaner Hahn: Raven, a $4,355 Nymphenburg porcelain piece, which Moss places atop a cast-aluminum fruit crate called Ortofrutta, designed by Andrea Salvetti, and beneath a sprawling vine-like copper mobile called Flora, the work of Dutch designer Tord Boontje. The resulting tableau of juxtaposed styles and centuries--Flora and Ortofrutta are from 2004, Ravenfrom 1911-- is typical Moss.
He is only partly joking about his aversion to selling merchandise. His showroom is set up to look and feel like a museum, with everything raised on platforms, locked behind glass, and carefully lit. Near each object is a placard giving the name of the designer, date of the design, and details about the materials, as well as the price. It can often be a very high price. The most expensive item in the shop it TK, which sells for $TK.
"Cheap is not in our business plan," says Getchell, who is the financial brains of the operation.
According to Michael Vince Snyder, TK of Moss, Inc., "If Moss was a movie, Murray would be the director and Franklin would be the producer."
Moss runs his store with a lover's passion and a dictator's discipline. "I am a monarchist," he says, standing near a glass case filled with Meissen and Nymphenburg porcelain (the former founded in 1710 by Augustus the Strong of Saxony, the latter in 1747 by Maximilian III Joseph of Bavaria). The colorful objects, which Moss got interested in--he would say obsessed with--eight years ago, serve as a strong counterpoint to the machine-made designs that dominate other parts the store.
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"When Murray opened the store in 1994, he would say, 'Hey, I just do industrial design,'" says Thea Westreich, a Manhattan art adviser whose clients include tk. "It was a very practical and beautifully rendered store for great design. What happened--and what makes Murray so special--is that he saw that great industrial designers were experimenting, and he went along with that. But at the same time he kept his feet firmly on the ground while he made combinations that nobody would ever think about, which allowed you to see what he was showing in entirely different ways. The old and the new were basically put together and presented in a way that allowed the viewing public to learn about design the same way it would in a museum. I consider what Murray does museum-quality. I have learned more about design in Murray's store than I have at any museum in the world."
Moss has become one of the most powerful tastemakers in the design world.
What Tiffany is to millions of gray-flannel-suit and tartan-skirt traditionalists, Moss is to a select circle of high-design worshipers. He is a figure on the order of Samuel Bing, the German art dealer who in 1895 opened a gallery called Art Nouveau, in Paris, and soon succeeded in raising the stature of decorative artists from William Morris to Pierre Bonnard. The entire Art Nouveau movement took its name from his store.
Though Moss's vision is very personal, his every shift in stock is bound to be viewed by manufactures, magazine editors, and museum curators as a potential harbinger of a new trend. Manufacturers have occasionally revived product lines especially for him; for example, TK. When in the late 1990s Moss started to embrace the high-priced products of a handful of mostly European designers such as TK, he sounded the death knell of the cheap chic movement of the early 90s.
For many years the ultimate stamp of approval for a work of industrial design was inclusion in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. When Moss started out, he looked to MoMA as well as the Vitra Design Museum in Switzerland, for inspiration. Today the museums follow him. "There is certainly a feeling among designers that they would rather be in Moss than MoMA," says London Museum of Design curator Aaron Betskey. "Moss can really make your career if he gets behind you. He made [the industrial designer] Marc Newson in the late 1990s. He's evolved into one of the most powerful figures around."
MoMA, as part of its recent $tk million makeover, patterned its design galleries after Moss. "That was flattering," says Getchell. "But what is strange is that Moss set up its store to resemble a museum, and MoMA's design department is now a museum resembling a store resembling a museum.
They copied light boxes, platforms and glass cases."
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