Interior Design Blog

Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery and curator of the exhibition, showed me around, and I asked him about the distinction between art and design. 'When I started researching this show, I looked at designers too,' he told me. 'I was looking at eccentric designers and, visually, some of that work would fit into this show, but in terms of its conceptual content and how it functions rhetorically, it doesn't [fit].'

Rugoff dismisses the notion of fine art having to be free from function as old-fashioned - indeed some of the exhibits in the show function rather well: British sculptor Martin Boyce's lighting installation Some Broken Morning (2008), a spider's web of fluorescent tube lights, helps to light the gallery space, but it also comments on the limitations, life spans and degradations to which commercially produced objects must eventually submit.

There are, unsurprisingly, a lot of beds in this show: beds and what goes on in them - birth, death and sex - have always fascinated artists. There's a bed with its mattress removed to reveal a base of barbed wire; there's also a bed by Cuban duo Los Carpinteros (the Carpenters) whose frame and mattress have been distended into the shape of a complex motorway intersection complete with flyovers and slip roads. The bed is one of the most familiar objects in a home, but here it has become an artwork of such scale that it could only really work in a gallery.

Featuring work by 36 artists from 22 countries, this tightly packed exhibition will fascinate interior designers and product designers. It takes the materials and objects of their trade - lights, chairs, lockers, desks and doors - and turns them into art which is by turns beautiful, disturbing and very funny.