Elton to reception please.
This just appeared on eBay
Not my cup of tea but very unusual I guess.
I could think of a better way to spend over £8000.00
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The quality of finishing looks really poor, it looks like the kind of thing you find in one of the London Tourist Tat shops
That’s a laughable bit of tat!! I wouldn’t give anyone £80 for that, looks like something you’d win at the fair!
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It’s but one of several Artya watches on eBay. All have crazy prices but look dreadful.
The emperor has no clothes and no decent watches.
I own two ArtyA pieces and they fit in perfectly with my collection that contains watches from Eddie through to Moser, AP and PP. They’re not for everyone, you either get them or you don’t, and even if you get one it doesn’t mean you’ll get them all. Yvan Arpa is rightly called the most interesting man in the watch industry and is well worth researching.
What you get with an ArtyA watch is something individual with a level of hands on craftsmanship that you don’t get with mainstream brands. What’s laughable are comments from watch enthusiasts on a watch forum calling them poorly finished tat when they’ve probably never handled one. Trust me, I’ve owned all of the usual subjects, the most poorly finished Yvan Arpa watch trounces the finishing of every other forum favourite.
I would say it's in a pretty used condition rather than badly finished. Quite a few marks here and there.
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Finishing looks poor to me. Internally bevelling simply done with no sharp lines. Main hand looks like it's simply stamped out.
Of course the diagonals of the Union Flag aren't correct either...
I get that the watch in the picture is trying to recapture a very particular sixties style found in guitars of the period and that's great. However, what you end up with is something that has been carefully designed and, I'm sure beautifully finished, to look precisely like an overdone Franklin Mint 'Memories of The Sixties' piece of tat. I'm sure it's entirely ironic, or post ironic, or whatever, but ultimately, it's not actually about watches.
So yes, I'm sure that he produces wonderful wrist statements that signify the quiddity of your individualism, but the idea that he is the most interesting man in the watch industry seems unlikely. There's a wonderful rush of real development with new escapements, new materials and so on and that is where the real interest is. This chap looks to me to be a conceptual artist much like Geoff Koons or Gilbert and George who is in the business of taking very conservative tech and rendering it up into visually challenging forms.
And that's cool. There's a place for knowing conceptual art, and it's great that the industry has enough money washing around for many flowers to bloom, but ultimately, after a quick google, I don't see anything interesting - I see plenty of radical looking bridges, wheels and ironic 'easter eggs', but underneath that I see the same basic, traditional, movement design dressed up like a Brighton transvestite.
And if that's what you like, that's great. But it does look like tat. Take the 'Swiss Made' logo that looks like Letraset because it's a homage to what would have been letraset in the sixties; it looks like tat now because it was tat then. Lovingly, perfectly recreated, tat. That's the problem with the ironic mode in art, if you can get other people to see the invisible clothes then it's art. If not...
Of course, I may have missed something, but I'm always happy to be schooled.
ArtyA will be offering a one-off piece based on the Son of Sound model for the Onlywatch auction in Monaco, held every year to raise funds for research into Muscular Dystrophy. They are working in collaboration with John McClaughlin - the watch dial will be a reproduction of a unique PRS guitar made for and played by McClaughlin. The lot will be the watch and the guitar.
Looks like the kind of thing a mick jagger lookalike would wear to hang around the Hard Rock Cafe in if it’s still going that is