Need a Bookcase or Coffee Table? Check Out Christopher Columbus’s Tag Sale
No, you can’t buy the Nina, Pinta or Santa Maria. But how about a price-slashed Mitchell Gold white leather side chair? Or a deeply discounted 48-inch Samsung LED TV?
Last fall I wrote about Christopher Columbus’s living room – the one artist Tatzu Nishi designed up in the air around the famed Christopher Columbus statue (you could visit the living room, see Gaetano Russo’s towering marble statue up close and personal, then cross the street and gaze down upon Columbus’s temporary abode from the lounge on the 35th floor of the Mandarin Oriental New York).
This morning the Public Art Fund launched an online tag sale of the contents of the great explorer’s living room. Demand for the sofas, side tables and even candlesticks was so fierce the site crashed briefly.
Small surprise. Nearly everything is for sale at half price. Yes, items are lightly worn – some
100,000 visitors plopped on the sofas and put their feet up on the coffee table – but most have a Bloomingdales and Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams pedigree and are guaranteed conversation starters.
Offerings include a velvet Mitchell Gold sectional ($1,950), a Maria Yee sideboard ($1,500) and a set of bookends ($30), all displaying the good if middle-of-the-road taste Nishi ascribed to the discoverer of America. Proceeds go to the not-for-profit Public Art Fund.
The Columbus statue, by the way, is once again on view in the open air, restored to its 1892 glory after the living room exhibition closed early last month. We suggest sipping a Pomme Royale (apple cider, peach nectar, cinnamon-sugared rim; $9) at the window-table at the Mandarin Oriental for optimum bird’s-eye viewing.
I’ll let the more affluent go for the pricier sectional and sideboard, all for a good cause, the Public Art Fund. I’ll go for the bookends, if they might be available.
Thanks, Ron. It was all pretty good stuff.