At MAD, Verena Sieber-Fuchs Explodes Cliches Of Jewelry

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THE DAILY PIC (#1333): I recently saw this dangerously lovely Firecracker Necklace at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. It was made in 1986 by the important avant-garde jeweler Verena Sieber-Fuchs, and I think it stands for what all serious contemporary jewelry should be, but isn’t: Something so explosively new that it feels dangerous to make and wear it. Even three decades on from the design of this piece, art worn on the body is still mostly craven, wrapped up in the most conservative, oligarchic notions of what counts as beautiful and worthwhile. I want to put Sieber-Fuch’s piece around the (metaphorical) neck of the entire discipline, and light its fuses. (Museum of Arts and Design, gift of Donna Schneier; photo by John Bigelow Taylor)

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