The product I liked best at ICFF was a silly one: a glossy fussball table by R S Barcelona that features female players.  Very early in the morning, after a tortuous trip from home that included three subway transfers and a descent into the basement of the Javitz Center, it made me smile.  The tables have candy-colored metal enamel frames, far too pretty for a bar.  Their bright and shiny  colors drew me in and then, a full minute later, I realized what was really going on.

There’s nothing feminist about the table and nothing revolutionary about it either.  It’s all in the service of the same rather dumb parlor game, a classic time-waste.  But it’s refreshing to see female figure designed for action and rather than dress-up, and it’s reassuring that the table is from Spain.  In America the likeness of a female fussball team would most likely have been implemented (and then interpreted) in the spirit of Title IX.  My image of Spanish womanhood had always been the eye-popping, overdressed Madrilenas in Pedro Almodovar films.  This toy, rather simply, throws a new figure into the mix.

I saw a young man at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) ride a bike through it, and it struck me that he had exactly the right idea.  This year’s show is significantly smaller than it’s been in previous years, but it still fills the lower level of the Javitz Center.  In previous years it’s been thrilling to walk the floor, and each new booth had the potential to surprise and delight.  But this year I spent an hour walking through aimlessly and then took a seat while my friend finished her viewing.  The floor felt like an endless array of the same handful of products: artisinal wood tables, artisinal hand-blown glass lamps, and artisinal wallcoverings.

I’m all for a return to craft, sustainable materials, and small-scale fabrication.  But most of the artisinal products at ICFF are far too obsessively designed and machined to be authentically artisinal, or even artsy.  Their one-off hand-finished look is just an aesthetic.  It’s obvious that, behind the reclaimed materials and artfully irregular finishes, highly ambitious trained designers (frustrated architects, perhaps?) are at work.  The rage for handmade stuff has already been parodied, lovingly, by the iconic Put a Bird On it! skit on Portlandia.  What’s the limit to the number of artisinal products the market can bear?  Isn’t it just a matter of time before the sensibility, like all other trends, falls out of fashion?

Pairing Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli, as the Met has for this year’s Costume Institute blockbuster, doesn’t serve either designer well.  Prada’s work, especially, would have benefited from a different context, perhaps that of the fabled brand’s history, which is also her family history.  Miuccia’s grandfather Mario started the company in in Milano in 1913, with a shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II that sold handbags, suitcases and other small leather goods.  That store is still there, with its lovely Victorian trappings: a checkerboard stone floor, utilitarian steel racks, and P-R-A-D-A spelled out in gold foil on the glass.

It was Miuccia Prada who oversaw the brand’s (brilliant) expansion from accessories to shoes and then ready-to-wear in the 1980’s.  Prada never, however, entirely shook off its identity as an accessories brand.  The shoes and bags have become iconic, deeply desired by both those who know fashion and those who don’t.  On a deeper level, there’s a raw physicality to the brand’s products, even the clothing, that hearkens back to its workmanlike origins.  Most of the garments on display at the Met possess a heavy, hearty sense of fabrication.  There are simple A-line skirts (Is Miuccia Prada the Stradivarius of the A-line skirt?) layered with shards of mirrors, fake jewels, plastic baubles, leather cut-outs, rivets, rings, and paillettes.  These embellishments are all slightly oversized —they’re more than just ornaments — and fastened with visible stitching and hardware.  There’s in the pieces great inventiveness and freedom; they really do, as Miuccia says she intended, stretch the boundaries of good clothing.  But there’s also in them, embedded, the image of her grandfather leaning over his work bench, making things with his hands.

One thinks of Elsa Schiaparelli as a wit more than an artist.  What pops to mind first are the shoe hat, the lobster gown, and the seed packet dress, creations that are more like one-liners than clothes.  What becomes apparent when seeing her work up close, as it’s possible to at the Met’s new exhibit Impossible Conversations, is that she was, also, an impeccable seamstress.  The dinner jackets are fitted and fastened with armor-like severity, and the floor-length gowns are draped asymmetrically, on the bias, with a sumptuous, casual mastery.  Without wit — without any ideas at all — the finesse of Schiaparelli’s cutting and draping would assure her reputation.

The Met exhibit pairs Schiaparelli with another great Italian fashion designer, Miuccia Prada, and is framed as a series of dialogues between the two.  Throughout the galleries there are video monitors showing the two great ladies chatting with one another in a special film by Baz Luhrmann.  Prada portrays herself, admirably, and actress Judy Davis portrays Schiaparelli with campy excess.  The fineness of the garments on display show up Davis’ portrayal.  (They also, unhappily, show up most of the Prada garments.)  On a mannequin encased in a full-height vitrine, Schiaparelli’s silk lipstick-printed gown looks less like a piece of clothing than a delicate, palpitating, creature.  It’s as if it were born rather than made.  All the cerebral references — to surrealism, to popular culture, to women’s roles — are rendered irrelevant.  When it comes right down to it, Schiaparelli knew how to make a dress.

The lobby of the Dream Downtown hotel on West 17th Street is full of splendors:  clouds of hand-blown glass lamps, acres of dark wood end-grain floor, and Alice in Wonderland-style tufted silver poufs.  But the greatest splendor of all is a subtle one, a line of four new ibeams introduced into the structure, an iconic mid-century modern building by Albert C. Ledner, to support the new penthouse above.

These columns are dressed, simply and skillfully, in rolled stainless steel casings secured with flush bolts.  They have such a subtle presence in the vast, open space that it’s easy to pass without seeing them, but once they catch the eye the rest of the lobby recedes.  The enclosures are similar to those Mies Van der Rohe used at the Barcelona Pavilion, shown above.  Stretching nearly fifteen feet high, each column at Dream cuts a spectacularly slender figure that dramatizes the strength of the steel inside.  Polished to a mirror finish, they very nearly disappear.  They’re sublime.

At the checkout at the Indian grocery I’m always tempted to grab some of the Parle-G biscuits they keep at the checkout to placate three-year-olds.  The packages, the size of soap bars, have a bright red-and-yellow graphic with the face of a jolly baby.  Parle-G’s are nice with black tea, more flavorful than Nilla wafers and less filling than shortbread, an everyday alternate to super-sweet, luridly-colored traditional Indian sweets.  They’re the best selling cookie in India, which might make them the best selling manufactured food product in the world.

The cookies take me back to my childhood, certainly, when they were an uncommon treat, but what grips me now is the loony, eye-popping graphic.  The combination of red and yellow and baby is endlessly appealing.  Indians vary in skin tone from coal black to snow white, but none of them have the cartoonish pink glow of this child.  Perhaps we ought to be up in arms about the Parle-G lass the way we are (or ought to be) about Aunt Jemima and Chief Wahoo.  Yet the baby is appealing: she wants some cookies and waits patiently for them.  Over the years the wrapper has become cluttered with blue and green emblems touting the snack’s (dubious) nutritional virtues, and now it’s made from tear-away plastic rather than the thick wax paper that it used to be.  I’m just thankful Parle hasn’t updated the blissfully innocent graphic.

A friend gave me a bouquet of candy-colored pink peonies for my birthday, which I kept for two weeks on my living room table.  They transformed from tight, dark buds to blossoms and then to balls of pale, withered, petals that fell to the carpet one by one.  It was unexpectedly moving watching them bloom and then perish so quickly, like the piercingly lovely flowers in a vanitas painting.

The lessons of these paintings had hitherto been lost on me, perhaps because I was just too young.  They say, Time moves forward and takes all things.  While some of the still-lives are hopelessly didactic, incorporating skulls and bones, all have a rich physicality that invites sensual participation.  They caution against the world and then lure us into it.  Pleasures is fleeting, they seem to say, so take it while it is there.

The Guggenheim has followed its virtually impossible-to-follow Maurizio Catellan installation with a powerful but more classically-bent John Chamberlain retrospective.  The exhibit makes clear that while the building displays paintings functionally, it’s really a much, much better venue for sculpture.  Surfaces have a hard time holding their own inside the extraordinarily plastic space but objects can compete on the same level.  Almost perversely, the bigger, bolder and more egregious a sculpture, the more comfortably it sits within the museum.

Chamberlains pieces are beautifully scaled for the rotunda galleries, where one large freestanding work has been installed at the center of each bay.  The arrangement allows visitors to circle them and see them from up close.  I was fortunate to visit with a friend who has worked in steel fabrication and he called out the delicate bolts and solders that were holding the metal shards together, as well as the processes used to cut and color them.  While at first glance the sculptures seem like giant tin foil balls, they’re actually exquisitely composed and have an overriding classical repose.  They look most splendid from afar, and peering over the (precariously low) Guggenheim guardrail offers shifting, cinematic views of works across the way, works that you’ve just examined or expect to encounter soon.  Mounted on the building’s canted floors and walls with concealed wires and angles, these steel concoctions have the sweetness and delicacy of hothouse blossoms.

Renzo Piano has become our go-to architect for museums.  He designed the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1977 with former partners Richard Rice and Richard Rogers and then, solo, the Menil Collection and additions to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art.  The Pompidou Center is a singular piece of work, but the others are tasteful, intelligent and unobtrusive structures that generally stay out of the way of the artwork.  So nothing prepared me for the power of Piano’s addition to the Morgan Library, which opened in 2006 but I saw for the first time last week.  I’ve passed its discrete, metal-clad entrance on Madison Avenue countless times and simply walked on by, so unprepossessing did it seem from the sidewalk.

But the interior is commanding, a place where pristine cartesian space rules.  Piano’s addition, which serves as a lobby and cafe, connects three existing Morgan buildings, including the original Charles Mckim-designed museum from 1903.  Piano imagined the new building as a perfect cube and there’s a a geometric rigor in its details and construction as well as its proportions.  This modest glass box (it’s only about about eighteen feet high) gave me more pleasure than any other modern building I’ve visited in New York City.  My favorite parts are the framelesss glass elevator cabs (they’re also cubes) that rise and fall musically, and seemingly effortlessly, on exposed pistons.  American architects continually grumble that their clients prefer traditional styles and that their contractors can’t build finely.  This building shows otherwise.

A new play, Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, takes the controversial closing of the Natural History Museum at Amherst College in 2001 as its subject.  That neat, brick box, called the Appleton Cabinet, was subsequently converted into luxe student dorms.  In the play the woolly mammoth skeletons that reside inside serve as emblems of historical time, personal evolution, and our own artfully-concealed yet always-stirring animal natures.  When I attended a reading of the play I had no real scientific knowledge of woolly mammoths and also a surprisingly clear image of them.  I pictured them as clumsy, plundering beasts that made their home in snowy nether regions.

What was missing from my vision were the animal’s most salient feature, their enormous, gravity-defying, corkscrew-twisted tusks.  Our images of woolly mammoths are fantasies, not so different in their speculation than our images of unicorns and mermaids.  In dioramas the woollies are typically depicted as friendly, hairy elephants, and in scientific illustrations as noble monsters.  My favorite image might be the skeletons themselves, which make them seem like big horses with fancy tusks.  It’s a happy fantasy.