Time today is instantly available from a watch on your wrist or a smartphone in your hand. So it is something of a surprise to realize that the traditional clock still stimulates the imaginations of superstar designers and contemporary design artists. Their trove of inventive takes on an analog timepiece is anything but old fashioned.

Take the Australian designer Marc Newson, renowned for his fast-forward designs from an airplane to furniture. (His now legendary pop-riveted aluminum and fiberglass Lockheed Lounge chaise longue sold for more than $3.7 million at auction last April, setting a record for an object by a living designer.) He has created a host of singular timepieces, not to mention his continuing collaboration on the Apple Watch.

“I’m a huge fan of clocks, whether they are digital or not,” Mr. Newson wrote in an email. “The idea of a centralized object in the house (or elsewhere) is a wonderful device with which to orientate oneself, not only physically, but symbolically. “I find my gaze constantly drifting in the direction of my Atmos, seduced by how completely timeless an object it is — in many ways future-proof and completely analog,” he continued. “I love that.”

Mr. Newson’s Atmos 566, created in 2010, is his latest reinterpretation of the iconic Atmos clock first designed in 1928. Powered by small variations in atmospheric temperature, it is virtually perpetual. Created with Jaeger-LeCoultre in two limited editions of 28 (from 102,000 to 123,000 euros, or about $113,000 to $136,000), the timepiece would catch anyone’s eye. Its mechanism seems to float in clear or blue Baccarat crystal cubes, with a blue enamel dial. The designer also added indicators of the month and the equation of solar with real time, as well as a sky chart of the Northern Hemisphere with the cardinal point and zodiac signs.

As for his Hourglass timepiece, first introduced in 2011 as 60-minute and 10-minute models, “I was thinking of having fun with time,” Mr. Newson said. Each one is hand blown in Basel, Switzerland, from a single tube of clear borosilicate glass, and contains millions of tiny gold- or silver-plated stainless steel balls. When the glass is inverted, they bounce down in a mesmerizing fashion that Mr. Newson has compared to gazing into a fire.

In 2014 the designer formed HG Timepiece with the horology consultant Nicole Viot and introduced quality upgrades to the Hourglass as well as adding 30-minute version last year. The latest Hourglass versions, with Mr. Newson’s signature etched into the glass, range in price from $12,000 for the silver 10-minute model to $42,900 for the gold 60-minute one.

Less is more

Having fun was also the stimulus behind the French superstar designer Philippe Starck’s latest clock, Time Less for Kartell with Jonathan Bui Quang Da.

It is a minimalist sprite of a wall clock with just eight, rather than the usual 12, hour markers and a small central mechanism with two clock hands, made of copper, chrome or gold-toned metalized thermo plastic. (A new version of the clock is still in prototype; neither the price nor introduction date have been finalized.)

The other ingredient is “emptiness,” as Mr. Starck put it in a phone interview. “This clock speaks of space.

“The idea is to show that time is infinite,” he continued. “Putting a clock in a case limits its relationship to the beauty and understanding of the infinity of time.”

Ticking along

New-wave haute horology also has lured the design art world.

In 2013, when the Spanish design artist Nacho Carbonell created a family of eight massive bronze zoomorphic sculptures for his Time Is a Treasure collection with Galerie BSL in Paris, he planned to use slices of blue agate. But, when the centers of the agate slices were sold to a Place Vendôme jeweler to make clocks, “I decided to give my creatures the right to be clocks, too,” Mr. Carbonell said.

Some of the sculptures are pot-bellied; others have long caterpillar shapes. They may sit on stubby feet or stand on long stilt legs. But each one conceals a hidden, but distinctly ticking, clock that brings it alive. (And he used the remains of the agate slices to encircle his sculptures’ mouths.)

“You cannot remain indifferent to these endearing creatures,” said Béatrice Saint-Laurent, the gallery’s owner. “They talk to you, ticking and ringing, inviting you to look into them to see the clock and to also experience the personal time that is ticking within ourselves.”

Four of the original limited-edition pieces are available at €16,000 to €32,000.

Landmarks

“Through the centuries, there has always been a fascination with clocks and they have always been collectible,” Loïc Le Gaillard, the co-founder of the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris, said in a telephone interview. “The artist’s magic stretches the object into a sculpture and endows it with a secondary function of time.”

In collaborations with the gallery, the Studio Job design duo of Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel included clocks in several of their famous landmarks series made in patinated bronze, hand-blown glass, aluminum, marble and gold and silver leaf.

The showstopper in the limited-edition collection was the Burj Khalifa, created in 2014. Its clock — along with a likeness of the cliff-hewn Treasury of Petra — is behind the bronze doors of a cabinet in the base. Above, a cast aluminum reproduction of the Dubai skyscraper, the world’s tallest building, is scaled by a black crystal-clad King Kong with a small fleet of vintage planes buzzing about him.

“We started doing clocks from the time I was still at the academy back in the mid-90s,” Mr. Smeets, who studied in Eindhoven, Netherlands, explained in an email. “I was always surrounded by clocks at home since my father used to restore them, but no soul was doing them because modernism was convinced the chair was the only true icon in design — time will tell.”

Face time

The Netherlands-based Maarten Bass has reinvented the grandfather clock for the Carpenters gallery.

Housed in a traditional wooden tower case, Mr. Baas’s clock face is animated by a 12-hour looped film of a shadowy male figure, presumably the grandfather, apparently inside the clock and drawing each minute with a black marker on its face. He then erases the minute marker and hand; the old minute is gone. And he begins anew, redrawing and erasing them, minute by surprisingly slow minute.

Mr. Baas calls his concept “Real Time” and it shows the observer just how much can be squeezed into 60 seconds: You see the grandfather inside the clock also having a drink or a bite of a sandwich as time moves forward.

“I wanted to emphasize that no one knows what a minute is, or what time is, yet we plan everything to the minute,” Mr. Baas said in an email. “The clock has become an abstraction, far from the actual passing of time. In ‘Real Time,’ I bring that passing of time back.”

The clock has drawn double-take reactions. “The size of the clock is the same as a human so physically the public can imagine the guy living inside the clock,” Mr. Le Gaillard said.

Clock of the walk

In another collaboration with the Swiss clock manufacturer L’Epée 1839, Maximilian Büsser unleashed his latest MB&F desk roboclock, called Sherman, at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva in February.

Sherman rolls around on caterpillar tracks inspired by the M4 Sherman tank and has two simple missions: His chest tells the time and, like many MB&F pieces, he aims to provoke a grin, making the world a happier place. The clock comes in three limited editions: plated in palladium or gold, or gilded and set with diamonds at prices ranging from 13,800 to 33,000 Swiss francs, or about $13,900 to $33,300. MB&F also plans to unveil a Performance Art table clock at Baselworld.