Insane, yes, and a testament to the rapid growth of interest around craft that has swelled over the past decade, as major institutions and collectors alike have begun snapping up works that, in previous decades, they may have overlooked. (The prices for ceramic and glass and textile works have all skyrocketed.) Anderson himself paused to reflect on a pivotal moment from his early days in London, when he picked up a Lucie Rie salad bowl at auction, inspiring the beginning of his now sprawling collection of art and objects: “Now, it would be impossible to pick up a piece of hers that easily,” he added. “There’s a different appreciation of these objects—not just in the commercial sense. There’s been a real change in how we see the hierarchies of these artistic practices.” It’s an iconoclastic approach to showcasing different disciplines alongside each other that Anderson himself had a hand in popularizing with his brilliant “Disobedient Bodies” exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2017, which presented distortions of the human form via everything from Henry Moore sculptures to Comme des Garçons dresses.
But back to the Palais de Tokyo galleries, where guests discovered the work of the 30 artisans whittled down by the selection committee, following a route that snaked its way around a central partition wall. Against panels of shimmering silver tiles, the joy of discovery lay not just in the individual objects themselves, but in how they were placed in dialogue by the Loewe Foundation team. Against one such wall of silver sat a pair of baskets that showcased how two artists of different backgrounds—the Indigenous American basket weaver Jeremy Frey, who is based in Maine, and Polly Adams Sutton, who was born in Illinois but primarily works with materials from her current home state of Washington—can create work that, when viewed together, sings. Frey’s elegant lidded basket served as proof of the extraordinary refinement of ancestral Wabanaki nation weaving techniques, adding a rhythmic touch with his use of colored dyed strips; against its statuesque presence, Adams Sutton’s undulating basket created from hand-gathered cedar wood felt both delightfully wonky and strangely seductive. (Just around the corner, the special mention winner Boos was demonstrating how to stack and move the glossy chocolate-colored bricks of his stackable, Lego-inspired coffee table.)