Author: Michael Chappell

We are returned to San Francisco, the truck is unloaded and the galleries are arranged- sort of. Keith and I are so tired we can barely stand- but that is a good thing.

Good because, during the run of the Los Angeles Antiques Show, we barely had an opportunity to sit down. We don’t precisely know what the numbers were, but traffic in our stand was brisk. What we saw that was most significant- and a pleasant change from the last couple of years- were the interior designers shopping the show with their clients. Several were old friends we see, and do a bit of business with, every year. Quite a number were designers we see only only occasionally, and a refreshing number were younger, eager to have the opportunity to show their clients the broad range of fine quality items at the show. What’s encouraging, and bodes well for follow-on business, was that the design community, from sole practitioner to AD100, had some wonderful projects going using antiques and artwork.

It was our sense that the experience of dealers in most classes- from furniture to fine art to ethnographic material- did pretty well at the show. Mid century modern was represented, but it didn’t do quite as well at it might have. However, the Los Angeles Modernism Show is opening this coming weekend at the Santa Monica Civic Auditiorium, so perhaps buyers were awaiting that. In fact, a number of mid century dealers at the LA Antiques Show were planning to participate in the Modernism show.

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.

We always have the local news on the TV when we’re eating breakfast and getting ready to go down to the galleries. This was part of our morning routine in London and we’ve continued to do this in San Francisco- unreliable weather and public transport are two features that both cities have in common and make watching at least portions of the local AM news imperative.

This morning, what caught my eye was an advert for a home consignment store, with the camera panning across a swimming pool to the facade of a modern design house with lots of windows to interrupt the bare concrete walls. The next shot, inside the house, pictured a woman surrounded by disparate decorative items- a Noguchi-esque fabric covered standard lamp next to a vaguely Italian rococo armchair, upon which was seated an attractive 40 or 50 something woman who invoked, in diffident tones ‘I can afford to shop wherever I like…I choose to shop at Consignment Warehouse.’ Presumably the viewer, too, could avail themselves of the opportunity to buy this sort of cack and become thereby that diffident, ostensibly affluent, woman. What astonishes me is the strongly implied message that good living can be accomplished by anyone who wants to waste their money on junk that looks vaguely like but clearly isn’t the real thing. What a crock, and what poor suckers they are who troop down to these sorts of outlets to buy this kind of merchandise.

Unfortunately, this sort of approach, capitalizing on the ‘wannabe’ mentality, has crept into the fringes of the antiques trade with a number of websites that are the electronic answer to the low end antiques malls that occupy so many failed storefronts. Mind you, we formerly stopped at these if we passed them, but ceased doing so because we rarely found anything that was worthwhile. The antiques malls have moved online with a number of sites- we are bombarded with their spam daily. Just the other day, I typed in the search term ‘Regency’ on one of the sites that shall remain nameless. I got 5 pages with about 30 images per page showing the stock in trade of a number of participating dealers. Let’s define our terms first. Strictly speaking, the Regency was an historical period in England extending from 1811 to 1820 wherein, due to the physical incapacity of George III, his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was granted by Parliament leave to become head of state in the king’s stead- to act as regent, in other words. By logical extension, the decorative arts of this period are termed ‘Regency’. The Prince Regent, the Prince of Wales that was, was himself a prolific patron of the fine and decorative arts, and was notably adventuresome, witness the onion domes and spires of his Brighton Pavilion, in his taste. The Prince Regent’s fanciful taste aside, the fanciful descriptions and date and style attributions I saw on the online website would certainly leave the Regent himself in the dust.  For the life of me, I couldn’t find a single item, and this amongst 150 items illustrated, that was anymore than vaguely accurate in its description, with most of them- well, I can’t imagine where the term came from. No- I’m wrong. One item was described correctly- a mahogany and rosewood crossbanded breakfast table that we had sold to another dealer. They had reprised our correct description- verbatim, I might add.

What galls me about all this is that the punter goes online and browses and comes up with something that, either out of the guile of the dealer in the collective, or more likely out of their ignorance, inveigles the poor browser to make a purchase. Recourse? The buyer has none. Have you tried to return a purchase for money back or even credit for a purchase you’ve made online?

A couple of months ago, California Homes Magazine asked me to write a brief introduction to the antiques section of their semi-annual designers’ resource guide. What I suggested for both collectors and interior designers was to begin their search by attending a vetted antiques show- where every item in every dealer’s booth in the show was looked at by a panel of experts to make certain it was accurately described- and fairly priced for what it was.  Since the next West Coast vetted show following publication of the resource guide was the Los Angeles Antiques, I recommended that as the show to attend. I still do. Even if you don’t make a purchase there, what a great opportunity to find out what to buy- and what to expect to pay. Online sites- if the merchandise seems cheaper but you didn’t get what you paid for, what kind of value is that?

So, yesterday TEFAF Maastricht and today the online ‘antiques’ collectives. I guess that’s what we could call a study in extremes.

Although arguably the best of the fine art and antiques fairs, TEFAF Maastricht is in many ways a bellwether in the fine art and antiques trade. The fair concluded this past March 19th, with attendance of 71,000- a considerable number of punters, albeit a few fewer than last year’s gate. Maastricht is not exactly cutting edge in terms of the material offered- most offerings are well inside the accepted canons of art and design history. However, without question, nearly everything is of museum quality, and a number of institutional sales are racked up every year.

What was most interesting, and a new feature of this year’s Maastricht was the participation of both Christie’s and Sotheby’s as stall holders. Sotheby’s, of course, as they purchased the well-established fine art dealer Robert Noortman, one of the fair’s founders, but turnabouts fair play, Christie’s demanded equal opportunity, which was given them. Dealing not as Sotheby’s but as Robert Noortman, Christie’s then was required to adopt a nom de guerre, King Street Fine Art. Silly, but whatever the rules are…

Although many of my colleagues have bitterly complained about the inclusion of the auction houses, under any guise, within the precincts of a fine art and antiques fair, I find it interesting that the sales rooms themselves find it necessary. Indeed, with their marketing budgets vastly outstripping any dealer that I know of, why do they then feel the need?

A couple of reasons. First, they need to make money. That may seem obvious, but let me stress- they really need to make money. The amount of overhead in an auction house is tremendous. I can’t even estimate what just the occupancy cost of either Christie’s or Sotheby’s is in London alone, to say nothing of New York and Paris. Second, they have inventory to sell that they really need to sell. Presumably we all know that the major auction houses compete with each other to obtain the consignment of the best goods. David Rockefeller’s Rothko that will highlight Sotheby’s upcoming 20th century art sale in New York has been rumored to be guaranteed by Sotheby’s for $40m- that’s 4 with 7 zeros behind it. If it doesn’t sell, Sotheby’s will still write a check to Mr. Rockefeller for $40,000,000. In this case, Sotheby’s has made a safe, albeit high stakes, bet, but not every guaranteed lot sells. And if it doesn’t? They own it. And since it didn’t sell, it was either over priced or flawed. And, everyone in the art world- dealers and collectors- know that it didn’t sell at auction and that the auction house needs to get as much of their money back as soon as they can. Ripe for the picking, wouldn’t you say? Yes, and the auction houses know it, but there isn’t much they can do about this.

So, the auction houses need not only to attract consignments but to have a retail outlet for their misjudgments. And in this respect, their competitors at the art fairs, particularly Maastricht, certainly have the better of them. Dealers like Wildenstein and French and Company have been in business for well over a century, know where the best pieces are- often because they had handled them at some time in the last 100 years, and, consequently, repeatedly offer pictures and decorative pieces that are fresh to the market and always of the finest quality. Indeed, it is the best dealers’ connoisseurship that is a significant part of their stock in trade, and what many collectors, both private and institutional, are happy to pay for.

And the art fair patron? More money than time a lot of them, and browsing an art and antiques fair provides the opportunity to see a variety of pieces in a short amount of time. Maastricht, for instance, had 219 exhibitors. That’s a lot of merchandise, equivalent to waiting years to see the same number, to say nothing of the same level of quality, come under the hammer at the auction houses. And, the patron can transact their business privately. And, if they don’t like the piece in a year- they can take it back and have the dealer resell it- gratis! What auction house is even willing to provide the same service? And, on top of everything else, the patron may just possibly, or even probably, pay the dealer less than what the same piece might cost them if purchased at auction. Mind you, the consignor may be able to negotiate favorable sales terms- the buyer, considerably less often.

April our focus becomes almost entirely the Los Angeles Antiques Show. This is a big event for us, as its the premier West Coast art and antiques show. As well, its a fun show to do, because, not surprising, there are plenty of celebrities who annually come to see us. Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson, Jennifer Aniston, Martin Sheen, and Steven Spielberg are always there, and, bless them, buy something, sometimes many things.

This year, a considerable effort has been made to sex up the look of the show with redesigned graphics and new life has been given to the show, as well, with the work of the benefit charity, PS Arts. This is a dynamic organization well supported by the 30 and 40 somethings with a mission to support arts instruction in public schools where it exists, and bring it back into those schools where, tragically, it has vanished. Good luck to them, and good luck in their efforts to make the gala preview on April 25 a success. The venue is Barker Hanger at the Santa Monica Airport, easily accessible from either the Santa Monica or the San Diego freeways. This year, the show runs from Thursday, April 26 through Sunday, April 29, a day longer than it has in the past.