She'll sell you lots of stuff, but basically Martha [Stewart] does not believe in store-bought. She urges us to reject mass manufacturing and mass taste and to embrace the personal and the handcrafted. What she embodies is the opposite of conspicous consumption. It is something much more demanding and appealing: conspicuous creation.

While the women of the town flutter over the irrepressible Fausto, he begins forging a tailoring style of his own. Concluding that it's good for business to make very conspicuous creations, he designs a jacket made of live grass, a shirt with two extra sleeves and other madcap extravagances.

Bierk's sources may be impeccable, but there is a sense that the show represents yet another reshuffling of the deck. The new combinations pique our curiosity, but in the end Bierk's paintings are more convincing as acts of homage than of conspicuous creation.