A Design Exhibition That Proves Everything New Is Pretty Damn Old [Slideshow]

For any young designer who thinks that the most innovative design bubbles up from some wellspring of genius within, independent of his predecessors' crotchety ideas, the Design Museum Holon has a welcome rejoinder: an exhibit that argues that everything new is ultimately pretty damned old.

“We want to show different ways to work with tradition."

Organized by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), an arts organization, New Olds: Design Between Tradition and Innovation features more than 70 design objects that deftly straddle the divide between the past and the future. Some of the pieces are straightforward homages to the arts of yore -- Israeli Pini Leibovich’s Happy Material, for instance, a bold, exuberant chair made of thousands of balloons that channels surrealist art (and, in turn, the exuberant, contemporary design of the Campana Brothers). Others thumb their noses at the history books, like Front design’s Blow Away Vase, which warps classic Royal Blue Delft porcelain almost beyond recognition or Frank Willems’s Rubens chairs, which heap voluptuous, spray-painted mattresses atop antique chair legs to create furniture evocative of -- what else? -- a Peter Paul Rubens canvas.

The idea here isn't to blithely drop arcane historical references as a challenge to viewers: "Didya get it? Didya get it?" (Everyone knows that's what the art world is for.) The point is to prove how much history -- and in many cases, personal or national history -- informs innovation. In this sense, the exhibit is something of a public service to burgeoning designers. “We want to show the different ways in which it is possible to work with traditional aspects,” says curator Volker Albus in a prepared statement. “When exhibitions tour around the world, I notice that young designers are not aware of their own culture and try to copy the western style. In this exhibition, we have a lot of designers who work with traditional aspects, so I want to help designers to concentrate, to look at their own roots.”