For those of you who have wondered what would happen if King Midas played simultaneous games of Monopoly and dominoes while chatting on his cell-phone, fly-fishing and nibbling the occasional sardine, look no further than the Museum of Natural History. Featuring gold-plated and jewel-encrusted common objects, “Everyday Fantasies: The Jeweled Art of Sidney Mobell” places the ordinary in the world of the extraordinary.
Located outside the Gems and Minerals Museum Store on the second floor, the exhibit features such curiosities as a bejeweled Nokia cellular phone, diamond-studded dominoes, and a solid gold mousetrap complete with a tantalizing diamond-encrusted wedge of cheese.? As strange and novel as these objects may seem, they are mere trinkets when compared to the exhibit’s pi?ce de r?sistance: a gold-plated, be-rubied, be-sapphired, be-emeralded Monopoly set.
Visitors to the museum cannot help but pause before the display, mesmerized by the gleaming B&O Railroad title deed, the gleaming stacks of Chance and Community Chest cards and the honeyed reflection of a gilt top hat as it rests upon the shimmering surface of free parking. One cannot help but wonder what vision, or lunacy, inspired such creations. Who woke from fevered dreams and howled, “I must fashion some diamond-studded dice post-haste!”? Does the world really need a gold-plated “Get Out of Jail Free” card?
The white-lettered captions in the exhibit’s display cases answer some of these questions.?? The maker of these unusual creations is Sidney Mobell, a jewelry designer from San Francisco.? For the past 31 years, Mobell has been making an annual one-of-a-kind holiday design for Sidney Mobell Fine Jewelry.? While Hallmark issues ornaments and Mattel mints Christmas Ball Barbies, Mobell molds gold and diamonds into Frisbees.
For the holiday season of 1980, Mobell crafted a jeweled yo-yo featuring 44 diamonds, 25 emeralds, 25 rubies and 25 sapphires. Two years later, a gold and diamond pacifier was born, the gems totaling 2.27 carats. “Talk about a silver spoon in your mouth,” one visitor observed.
Mobell created his astonishing Monopoly set in 1988.? The game board is plated in 23-carat gold, and solid gold tokens, hotels, houses, and dice sparkle across its surface.? The board and its pieces are adorned with rubies, sapphires, and diamonds, a total of 165 gemstones weighing 51.21 carats.?
“Hey, hey!? How much money do you think this is?” a visiting girl shouted to her parents, the pair having missed the display in their rush to see the Hope Diamond.?The mother glanced over her shoulder and extended her hand towards her daughter. “A million dollars,” she said.
The Monopoly set is undoubtedly the most valuable article in the exhibit, but I was more enamored with Mobell’s 1990 creation: the Diamond and Gold Sardine Can.
Dull metal containers, finger-length fish carcasses, eyeballs filmy with the thin gray that swirls across a soap bubble when it’s ready to burst, and the smell too specific to articulate, except that it burns like a lit match thrust up your nose-I thought of none of this as I examined Mobell’s sardine can. It had elegant curves of amber light, sparkling showers of silver-blue scales, and a key so smooth and dazzling it could unlock a star-I could not believe I had never noticed the sardine’s beauty before.
With the sardine can, as with his other creations, Mobell achieves something remarkable.? He forces us to see the extraordinary beauty present in what we consider trivial and mundane. Sidney Mobell is not an artist skilled at molding valuable foils and rocks. He is an artist skilled in peeling back the cardboard, plastic and prejudice of everyday life and showing us the hidden glitter that we had missed from the beginning.
Everyday Fantasies: The Jeweled Art of Sidney Mobell is at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, located at 10th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W.
