Sidney Mobell, a San Francisco-based jewelry designer, makes turns ordinary, everyday items into extraordinary, though often odd, works of art. In 2003, 19 pieces of Mobell’s work were donated to the Smithsonian for their US National Gem Collection. Because his work often is often laden with gems, it became the Smithsonian’s Mobell Collection of Jeweled Art. His work is world-renowned for being both intricate and outrageous, even earning him a place in the “Guinness Book of World Records” for the World’s Most Expensive Monopoly Board.
The famous Monopoly board weighs 32 pounds, includes 60 diamonds, 47 sapphires, and 24 rubies. Each of the 28 title cards is gold plated, the tokens are 18-karat gold, and 42 diamonds display the numbers on the dice. It is valued at over $2 million.
Having begun as a designer of diamond jewelry, his clients included the rich and famous from around the world. Christina Onassis is a big fan of his work. Then his inspiration turned elsewhere, beginning with a sardine can. Using a regular can of sardines as his exemplar, Modell spent a day in his shop, emerging from it with a replica made of 18-karat gold with 55 diamonds around the edge of the lid. He later said, “My wife thought I was crazy.”
He created mousetraps of solid gold and studded with a wedge of pave-diamond cheese, which earned him a spot on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. He designed a diamond-encrusted gold cell phone, an 18-karat gold pacifier with 8 round brilliant diamonds, and, as a gift for his wife’s friend, a gold fishing reel studded with 5.1 carats in diamonds, 237 sapphires, and 253 rubies. He designed that piece so the gems would cast a kaleidoscope effect as it spins. He also included with that gift a solid gold fish hook.
Now 19 of his pieces are touring the country, making people look at precious metals and gemstones in a whole new light. A person can look at a solid gold pacifier and wonder ‘why?’, or wonder if it is worth as much when it is shaped as an ordinary object—as opposed to being a necklace or pair of earrings or ring. Would anybody actually play on a $2 million Monopoly board? But these are not the questions Mobell had in mind when he created. He mostly did it for fun. That is part of what makes his work genius
