We begin setting up for the Los Angeles Antiques Show today and finish tomorrow, and the vetting for everything in the show is on Tuesday morning. The LA show is always fun to do and, for the dealers, a large show of this quality becomes old home week- people you don’t see but annually, and this includes the dealers, as well. Two of my favorite people, Penny and Allan Katz, will be returning to Los Angeles this year after an absence of four years, with their extraordinary collection of American folk art. Allan is a regular on PBS’s ‘The Antiques Road Show’ and I am sure there will always be a queue at his booth, awaiting his autograph. I wonder how Penny enjoys being married to a celebrity?
Considering Allan’s material, though, puts me in mind of some larger issues confronting antiques shows which, as a number of my previous blog entries have discussed, have hit on difficult times over the last couple of years. This year, the New York Winter Show, Palm Beach, and even to some extent TEFAF Maastricht have encountered tough sledding, struggling with lower than usual gates. Compare, though, the art fairs, including one this past January at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, the venue for the LA Antiques Show, packed with younger buyers, with nearly every dealer doing well.
One of the problems, it seems to me, is a conflict in the art and antiques trade both demographic and and verbal. We have a changing of the guard amongst buyers- many of our clients are now in their 30’s and 40’s with no experience of antiques save what they may have seen in Grandma’s sitting room. Masses of glowering brown furniture are off-putting to today’s buyer, whose taste is informed by the hegemony of the interior designer whose visions are generally fairly spare with blank space relieved by the occasional artwork or decorative object. As well, the masses of shelter publications- national, regional, and local- make any buyer spoiled for choice in terms of decoration. In both editorial coverage and advertising, antiques and art have to compete with new and audacious fabrics, myriad stone and tile treatments for floors and walls, and designer plumbing fixtures.
So, where does this leave us? For our buyers, the term ‘antique show’, absent of any qualifying or explanatory text, could unfortunately imply a gathering of dated looking material evocative of a passé aesthetic. Of course, the LA Show is the furthest thing from this, with a cutting edge selection of the best possible material from all historical periods. The best shows should be this way. Significantly, the LA Show has about the strongest and most prominent support from the country’s best interior designers as any show going. Michael Smith, Joe Nye and a number of others shop the show, bring clients, and have their names appear prominently in the show’s publicity and literature.
The Los Angeles Antiques Show, with its new look publicity and its strong base of support in the design community might just be the template for a vigorous antiques trade.