Cardboard Crown by David Bielander. A Future Classic in Contemporary Jewellery

Barbara Paris Gifford, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York for the past twelve years, responds to Klimt02’s invitation by sharing her Future Classics selection. Rather than focusing on contemporary jewelry already established within an unquestioned canon, the series seeks to highlight works whose conceptual depth suggests the potential for lasting historical significance.

With his Swiss childhood, formal goldsmith training, and Otto Künzli as a mentor (also Swiss), it was inevitable that David Bielander make a cardboard crown of gold. Like comrade Künzli before him, who sheathed a gold bead in rubber for his unassailable classic, Gold Makes Blind, Bielander problematized the value of gold by disguising it as a child’s prop, a crown made of paper.
Every child dreams of being a queen or king, donning a priceless adornment on their head that bestows agency and power, such as those seen in exclusive museum collections. For birthdays, no need for gold, diamonds, rubies, or pearls, a cardboard crown does the trick. Bielander must have remembered this.

Nonetheless, as a serious act of adulting, he first thought he would be a traditional goldsmith. Apprenticing with Kurt Degen and Georg Spreng for six years between them, his skills were honed, but his Swiss humor remained mute. He obtained an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, adopting an ethos closer to his own and prioritizing his ideas to sit alongside his formidable skill. With the ability to dream up and make almost anything, his brand of humor came to the fore -- less butterflies and peacocks and more slugs and hedgehogs.

A nagging curiosity about cardboard manufacture led to making the cardboard jewelry series. Bielander pondered and studied the look and structure of cardboard, finally creating his own tools to make gold sheets look like corrugated paper. The series included rings and bracelets, but arguably, the crown was the best marriage between concept and form. It not only brought back childhood memories, it questioned the role of value, power, truth, and materials in jewelry. The contemporary jewelry field that values alternative, egalitarian materials had to determine if this was still the case if those supposed materials are actually precious. Does gold decrease desirability? What wins out, material or skill? For wearers, if gold is worn on the head, is it desirable if it looks like cardboard? These lead to even bigger questions about self, identity, culture, and society, making the series a true work of art.

Contemplating these issues or simply desiring to marvel over the trickery of the crown makes it a fan favorite at MAD. People come to the Museum just to see it. It is the crown jewel of our collection, recalling historical traditions, revealing the universality of experience, demonstrating a balance between concept, materials, and visual language, containing layers of meaning, and displaying technological wonder. It is a contemporary classic.



Why Future Classics?
What Makes a Contemporary Jewellery Piece Become a Classic? Our aim is not to define academic criteria or impose any form of conservatism, but to collect subjective perspectives that help us understand the values and expectations shaping our field, without reducing them to fixed rules or hierarchies. By sharing these voices, we invite you to think together and open a conversation about durability, relevance, and the ways particular works contain certain patterns or enigmas that make them continue to speak over time.

 

About the author

Barbara Paris Gifford is a senior Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD, New York) with a specialty in fashion and jewelry. She has been part of the curatorial team for 14 exhibitions, including Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin (2015), Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years, Counter-Couture: Handmade Fashion in an American Counterculture (2017), and The World of Anna Sui (2019). She has written for many publications and exhibition books, and has participated in numerous roundtable discussions and symposiums. She holds a Master of Arts degree in the History of the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture from the Bard Graduate Center.