Meet The Titans Of Taste

Her criterion is simple: "I try to decide," says Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art, "whether the space an object occupies on Earth is well used." If that sounds like a high bar to clear, just look at what Antonelli is holding. And wearing. "Post-it notes are smart, beautiful and cheap. That's the apotheosis of great design," says Antonelli. "Yellow is an attention-getting color. And square is a classically rational shape." And the Bic pen? "Its translucency is functional--you see how much ink is left. But it also looks good."

Since joining MoMA in 1994, the Italian-born Antonelli has emerged as a star in the design world. She has a lively eye and, like Murray Moss, a gift for crystallizing ideas for those of us who don't know our Eames from our elbow. "Just like people can tell good steak from bad, I want it to be the same with design," she says. Someone ought to write that down. Got a pen?

Thoroughly Modern

Terence Riley, CHIEF CURATOR, MOMA

Like all great chairs, it's not very comfortable," says Terence Riley of his object of choice, a stretched-metal club chair named "How High the Moon" by the late Japanese design icon Shiro Kuramata. Riley knows that this sort of thing is what miffs people about modern design. If a chair's no good for sitting on, after all, what's the point? "Does anyone ask the Queen of England if she's comfortable?" he counters. "There's more to comfort than it being soft on your tush." Light passes through gaps in the Kuramata chair (manufactured by Vitra), making it glow "like a cloud or a haze," he explains. It may not please your tush, "but it conveys a sense of here and now."

And anyway, Riley doesn't need you to buy the chair, he just wants you to appreciate it. As head of MoMA's architecture and design department, Riley is the gatekeeper of the country's pre-eminent modern collection. (MoMA is so revered that both Riley and his star deputy, Antonelli, are internationally renowned.) His job is to draft a record of the present through its objects, meaning every choice may not be pretty. "It's not about beauty," he says. "It's about a way of thinking."