Martin likes the monobloc chair because he recognizes elements of crown and throne in it, which are also present in his pharoah prints. My associations: the monobloc integrates royal elements with a cheap mass-product. Here we have the meeting of singularity and universality that Meagan spoke of. The Monobloc is interesting to us not only from an art-history point of view: from Beuys "everybody is an artist" ("jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler") to "everybody is a king"? (euphemistic, i am afraid)
The play on the Beuys' quotation is quite appropriate: "everybody is a king". The phrase encapsulates the tension between singularity and universality that we have been noticing, perhaps most succinctly in Maegan's last post. Everyone wants to be a king, but there can only be one King. This is the desire of universalizing a particular experience, without losing the particular experience. (I think this tension connects to Gabriel's discussion with the fleamarket seller who noted that in a room of No 14s you can only have your favourite table...the singular chair becomes an "army" when it loses its singularity, as Maegan noted. We might want to play around with this idea of "family;" it's a nice phrase: "family of chairs...")
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