Author: Michael Chappell

Apropos Brian Sewell’s recent death, I’ve reread the first volume of his memoir, Outsider. It’s interesting, because in the reading, it’s clear to me that Brian was very much on the inside, but he felt an outsider because he lacked family position- indeed, was illegitimate- and was gay, or as he has it, much more opprobriously, queer.

Still, he seems to me more than sufficiently inside the trade during his early years to add gossip of the spiciest kind. I’m tempted to add a few flavorings of my own, but as we still have to swim in the same ocean, I’ll hold back- for now.

A couple of things I can say for certain, that the trade is still peopled with characters who perhaps one finds maddening on the day, but in the evening, can engender laughter, and for all that, though the players may have changed, their roles remain the same.  One gaggle of players, the major auction houses as an element in the trade have changed some players and some of their role, but still remain familiar, and at times maddeningly so.

The auction houses in former times, and certainly for Brian Sewell’s tenure in the auction world, were for nearly everyone in the retail trade the wholesale resource for all manner of material, from the best to the execrable, matching, as it were, the types of dealers that populate the landscape. Though the major houses are vaunted for their longevity, and in the last few decades for their sales of artwork with stratospheric prices, they were, certainly through the ‘60’s and into the ‘70’s, performing their traditional role of merchandising at public sale all manner of personal property. In the days in which London was the overarching art market city, sales tended to be primarily art and antiques that could then find their way into the retail trade. ‘Public sale’ should have been cited in inverted commas earlier, because, traditionally, the saleroom was a hothouse environment where the same auctioneers developed shall we say cozy relationships with the trade, such that often dealers were tipped off about upcoming sleepers, intentionally miscataloged to allow the dealer to obtain a gem amidst a welter of rubbish. Money for this privilege did in fact change hands. Has this practice, the result of greater transparency due to the huge disbursal of catalog material through online sales, faded from view?

Well, no. As an example, a well-known expert for one of the major houses, when we had inquired of her about consigning a piece of good quality that we knew we had no market for, our enquiry was always followed a day or two later by the arrival of a gentleman who we never saw otherwise, invariably enquiring about the item. Otherwise, we never, ever saw him. On another occasion, we sought to recover from the same house a collection that was consigned from the bankruptcy estate of a defunct public institution. The heirs of the original donor sought to recover the collection for sentimental reasons, although it was already in the hands of the auction house. The aforementioned expert had already seen the collection and given it a value and, we understand, was going to offer it shortly in a lower end sale as a job lot. On behalf of the heirs, we offered to purchase it at mid range auction estimate plus their normal commission. Whereupon the expert communicated to us that she had had another look, and felt her original estimate was too low, and raised the price significantly. We said okay, and she raised the price again, and then yet again. Well- we did finally acquire it, and as we were collecting the items from the saleroom, were met with icy politeness by the expert who gave us to understand she was of the opinion we had scooped her. By the way, this is someone who regularly appears on ‘The Antique’s Roadshow’, but where’s the harm, as no one believes anyone or anything they see on TV, do they?

Part of my daily routine during my tenure in London was, upon leaving the tube of an afternoon at Highbury Corner, fishing out 40p for the purchase of the Evening Standard from the news agent. It was in this way that I first became acquainted with the redoubtable art critic Brian Sewell.  Reading art history at University College, I was initially of the opinion that Brian, as a Courtauld laureate, was heavily dosed with the snotty pills that always seemed the baggage of the competing program we at UCL usually considered as brand x. Even Brian would acknowledge that much of this was a holdover from his mentor, the controversial but none the less brilliant Courtauld director, and Soviet spy, Anthony Blunt. Indeed, as Brian has noted, it was as Blunt’s protégé at the time of Blunt’s public unmasking that catapulted Brian into prominence. Tina Brown, then editor of Tatler, sought to make hay out of Blunt’s predicament by asking Brian, who had no prior experience, to be the magazine’s art critic.

I must say that Brian did Blunt proud by standing fast against the tide, rejecting influences that might have altered his strongly held- and not always well reasoned- opinions about art and contemporary culture. Whatever these opinions were, they generally accorded with mine, so I naturally considered him tremendously insightful. What he did, in an accent both in print and orally that was incredibly posh, was, using my own vernacular, to call a spade a spade. There exists a trope in art history known as the emperor’s new clothes, and this was something that doubtless was one of Brian’s favorites. If some manner of artistic production was crap, despite fawning accolades in other quarters, he was not afraid to say so, and I must say that crap would have been one of his least objectionable adject
ives. Some of the leading lights of contemporary art were the subjects of a Brian Sewell lambasting. He was no friend of the recondite or high concept which did, in his view, mask the artist’s shortcomings. Amongst my colleagues, those to whom canonical work spoke strongest loved Brian; those who tended to cleave to animals in formaldehyde hated him.

Still, Brian was level with criticism, and in one of his last TV appearances, a BBC series about the Grand Tour, gleefully pointed out the moneyed rapaciousness of the 18^th century English milordi, whose spoliation of Rome and the campagna of anything that smacked of antiquity forced the papacy to preserve what was best in what became the Vatican Museum.

It was through a mutual colleague that I met Brian, and despite his prickly public persona, I always found him charming, and surprisingly humble. The posh accent and the mannered, attenuated diction seemed less pronounced in person, or perhaps it just suited him.  Despite a stream of what could only be called one night stands, he never plighted his troth, and was at times lonely. His dogs assuaged this, and he never lacked for friends.  The passion he brought to his work never seemed to dim even as illness assailed him late in life. But for my own self, consider I’ve been extremely fortunate that Brian’s career extended through and nuanced so much of my own.

For about the umpteenth time, someone has brought to my attention an article published late last year in the New York Times about changing patterns of taste and how it has affected the antiques trade. Offhand, I would say that this change in pattern has more to do with the pervasive presence of le gout big-box than a rejection of le gout Rothschild but nevertheless, a run away from so-called ‘period rooms’, themselves more a holdover of Victorian style than an accurate homage to history. We’ve considered this change a given for as long as we’ve been in business. For myself, I love spare with items of period and type that link together to give interest, and not to overwhelm. That’s what we have in all our own living spaces- which includes where we work- and it is this that gives us our own look, and it is, at the end of the day, our look that sells the stock in trade that are its component parts.

With all that, I nevertheless have to acknowledge that what many people paid for period items even 10 years ago was expensive. Not, mind you, for things like the Badminton Cabinet, but for more vernacular pieces. I attended an auction this morning in the English Midlands wherein a fairly standard, workmanlike but very unprepossessing late 18^th century oak bureau was offered, and it sold for what it should sell for. However, it was sold along with the payment receipt and invoice from when it was sold by the retail trade in 1982. I was floored, not just that 30 years ago it commanded such an atrocious price, but that someone would be fool enough to pay it. But at some point in the past, dealers had so little invested in their inventory, and their cost of carry was so low, that they could mark items up hugely and wait until someone, and there always is someone, to whom the piece spoke and who also happened to have that much money in their wallet.

Now, of course, with a plethora of databases that any Luddite- by which I mean myself- can access, what’s reasonable both in terms of price and quality can be sussed out, and a reasonably informed dealer can speak reasonably to a reasonably informed punter about the merits of what’s on offer, and how price might be affected.

And prospective buyers are increasingly spoiled for choice, not just from vendors of period material, but also from the welter of online resources for contemporary- by which I mean brand new- pieces that are, as they say, both cheap and cheerful. But there’s still plenty of room, and sufficient demand, for the period item, provided it’s reasonably priced.  And that reasonable pricing, I hope, is the real change.

This morning’s inbox brought a missive about the final day in local business of one of our Jackson Square colleagues. While my handful of loyal readers have read, and re-read, and read yet again about the shrinking and eventual disappearance of established art and antiques venues from the world’s landscape, this one hit us particularly hard.

The why of this is that this particular dealer, Sarah Stocking Vintage Posters, had been our original benefactress on Jackson Square, providing the initial impetus for our opening, as it was then, directly across the very narrow street. She was never reluctant to let us know who the players were locally, not just amongst the dealers and collectors, but even including landlords and local politicos. Keith and I found her opinions and characterizations spot-on and consequently invaluable.

To say that Sarah’s stock in trade is excellent and that her knowledge about period posters is exhaustive is to repeat what is known by all the cognoscenti, but I’ll add to the chorus all the same. As she’ll continue to offer her stellar material online is some solace, and mind you, I doubt she’ll miss the commute from the Los Gatos home she shares with her redoubtable husband, antiques stalwart Charles Jay Conover. But for us, that she is leaving  Jackson Square is greeted with the same wistfulness that one finds with the end of a good book- an opening chapter, and then, ultimately, a closing one.

For those of you who’ve known me for more than a few years, also know that, for the first two decades of my working life, I worked for a bank, and during my banking tenure, basically did one job- commercial lending. Regardless of the type of entity, be it C-corp, LLC, LP- the business was always the alter ego of the principal owner, and it was with the owner that I sought to establish the relationship. And, too, relationship was key. We always sought to provide all the customer’s financing needs, not just because we wanted the business, which we did, but because so-called split financing situations, in the unfortunate circumstance of requiring legal means to collect a debt, inevitably resulted in a squabble amongst creditors. The technical term for this squabble was ‘pissing contest.’

While split financing was something the larger banks still seek to avoid, smaller banks and those new on the scene trying to build loan totals, always were the ones who, for lack of any other lending opportunities, would insert themselves into what is invariably a risky lending arena. However, one old aphorism, that no loan is ever bad when it is made, is true enough. They go bad, and for a few quarters, at least, loans that have inherent flaws, until there is actual payment default, are, for balance sheet purposes, good loans. And loan growth- what it is that actually earns money for a lender- is of paramount importance. After a year or two- and this happens to all new banks- the flawed loans default,  the bank scrambles for capital to cover losses, and the original management team is fired. This phenomenon is cumulatively known as the pigeons coming home to roost.

It is therefore interesting to see the growth in art market lending, carried on by non-traditional lenders including the major auction houses, making what amounts to loans based on the underlying value of the art collateral offered by clients. In one respect, the doing of this makes some sense for an auction house, as with the hypothecation of art collateral, a collector-borrower can then use the borrowed proceeds to make additional purchases from the auction house. Revenue enhancement, of course, realized not just through saleroom commissions, but interest earned on loans. So far, so good. But of course, this provides the classic opportunity for split financing, and it begs question, why did the collector-borrower not obtain his financing from his own bank? The answer must always be that the art market lender is willing to provide financing on more liberal terms, usually allowing a higher rate of advance against the pledged art collateral. And why would the art market lender be willing to do that? Ostensibly because art market lenders claim they know more about the value of the collateral, and if its liquidation becomes necessary, it has a greater ability to make itself whole. Sure. That’s why, over the past few years, the major auction houses have lost, and continue to lose, their tails on selling art objects that they have guaranteed or in which they otherwise have a financial stake.

The real reason for the growth in art market lending has been precisely for short term revenue enhancement- growth in assets, and growth in booked- but unrealized- revenue, in a competitive environment where more traditional sources of revenue, like sales commissions, are shrinking. All I can say is good luck, because these lenders will need it, not just to ensure the performance of their art market loans, but to make sure they have exited the premises prior to the pigeons coming home- and they will- to roost.