OBJETS.(The Talk of the Town)

Last fall, Marc Newson designed a surfboard for Garrett McNamara, the rex of big-wave tow-surfing. McNamara took the board--a silvery projectile, fashioned from hollow nickel--to Tahiti, wiped out at Teahupo'o, and considered it a goner. "The next day, driving to the airport," Newson said recently, "he spotted a massive Polynesian dude with this shiny piece of space junk under his arm." The board, it turned out, had washed up fifteen miles down the beach. Reclaimed, with a few dings and a fluorescent-pink baggage tag still attached, it was being readied, the other day, as part of an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, the first in New York of Newson's work.

The show, which runs until March, marks a departure for Gagosian, in that it showcases a designer rather than an artist (though this traditional distinction is becoming increasingly moot). Purists may fret that the gift shop is taking over the museum, but enterprising dealers, like race-car drivers, are happy to draft on the momentum: just across West Twenty-fourth Street, for example, Sebastian + Barquet is offering a Lockheed Lounge--Newson's rather unloungeable riveted steel chair from 1986--for two and a half million dollars. Over at Gagosian, an unused edition of the nickel surfboard will go for around a hundred thousand. Standing near a pile of work gloves and tape measures, three days before the opening, Newson surveyed the room. It was beginning to fill up with sleek furniture. "Working, it sort of feels like you're in the Army half the time," he said. (His clients have included Nike, Ford, Dom Perignon, and Qantas Airways.) "These projects are what I do when no one's breathing down my neck."

Newson, a rough-and-tumble party boy from Sydney, is forty-three. He spent his pre-adolescent years in South Korea, trained as a jeweller and sculptor, and landed, for a spell, in Tokyo. His first break came by chance, when his girlfriend and the entrepreneur Teruo Kurosaki shared an umbrella. In red socks, fringed suede moccasins, and--from his G-Star clothing line--a hoodie printed with a photograph of the interior of a Concorde and a pair of spent cargo pants ("I'm going to have to have them surgically removed soon"), Newson posed a contradiction: a mellow nomad fuelled by a flinty testosteronal intensity. "My inspiration is anger," he said. "Seeing things and getting pissed off and just going, 'It's so awful. Why ...