notes

Query- what makes an object a museum piece? Answer- because it is in a museum collection. There actually should be a corollary to this answer- because someone donated it to a museum or stumped up the money for its acquisition.

Everyone in the art and antiques trade feels an ego boost when selling to an institutional collector, but it is frankly something of a hassle to do so. In the first place, very few institutions have an acquisitions fund, and if they do, the museum professionals are so hamstrung in their ability to access it, they might as well have nothing. Moreover, any acquisition is made through a committee composed of curatorial staff and trustees that meets infrequently- and may change its collecting focus between meetings. Consequently, what might absolutely make the collection of any particular museum might be passed by because of a lack of funds, lack of focus, and/or the inability of the institution to act in a timely manner. While we do sell to museums from time to time, we also are familiar with the pat institutional declination of interest, phrased as follows-  ‘We are not making any acquisitions at this time.’

I say this by way of expanding the discussion about collecting started yesterday. Although my own sense of collecting makes it difficult to understand any notion of a collecting end-point, even museums, ostensibly the most professional collectors of them all, often pursue collecting interests in a manner, if not erratic, that can certainly seem less than systematic.

The best collections cannot be put together in a short period of time, simply because the finest material of any stripe, be it English antiques or Roman antiquities, presents itself in the marketplace on a piecemeal basis. As an antiques dealer, this makes for a wonderful opportunity, as we are in the marketplace daily and can acquire pieces as they come along- and offer them first thing to the collectors who we know will be interested. No collection is composed solely of star finds, but the collection put together quickly, given the limited quantity of material available at any given time, will likely be of more, shall we say, uneven quality.

Ironically, collections put together with inordinate slowness might also suffer the same fate. The institutional collector whose purchase comes only when a donor has money will find it has money burning in its pocket that has to be spent- before the donor rescinds the donation, the result of suffering some financial vicissitude or because the museum director inadvertently gave him a game look.

We received a rather surprising telephone call yesterday from an interior designer with whom we do business from time to time. She had expressed strong interest in something from our personal collection, that because it no longer quite articulated with the rest of the material, we were willing to sell. Surprising in that, although the piece was exactly what the designer wanted, it was no longer required as she had ‘finished out’, her words, the client’s collection.

For an antiques dealer, this happens with some frequency, and not just when dealing with an interior designer. The designers’ brief, of course, is to deploy colors and movables in a particular space to pleasing aesthetic effect. Not that I don’t believe that is important, but the better antiques and art dealer usually offers material that is an extension of the dealer’s own connoisseurship, and, like us, an outgrowth of their personal collecting passion.

Since passion overrules intellect, it is, consequently, at least difficult for a dealer to understand when a collection, even when put together entirely for decorative effect, is ‘finished out.’ For the collector, and that includes virtually all antiques and art dealers, collections can never be finished out, as one collects continually, upgrading the quality of one’s collections as taste, discernment, and the range of interests change. Moreover, the true collector will always be looking for something, and shedding things that are either outside the current scope or inferior to other items. For Keith and me, our showroom is the ultimate outgrowth of our own interests. While we do need to sell a piece of furniture or a painting or two to earn our daily crust, we determined some time ago that if we acquire strictly commercial material, we do so at our peril. Our business with other collectors, and even our interior designers, will find that they are in no small measure driven to purchase pieces from us that we can speak passionately about. As we say so often, we avoid having anything in inventory that does not have a compelling reason for being here. Always something about the piece, be it furniture or artwork- color, condition, subject, provenance, attribution, and generally a confluence of these- compel us to try and acquire a specific piece.

The responses I get to blog entries, every one of them, surprise me, as they are generally only obliquely related to the blog itself. Now that we are actively socially networking on Twitter, we’ve cast our nets wider beyond the 20 or so devoted readers with whom I seem to share a common mindset.

Although I opined yesterday that it was unlikely to the point of near impossibility to find a ‘sleeper’ either at auction or amongst the stock of any particular dealer, someone asked about getting good value in a contemporary gallery. Doubtless familiar with how poorly contemporary art has fared over the course of the last 12 months, my reader, who is working with an interior designer to acquire, curate, and display her growing collection of contemporary art, presumes that this might be one of those buy now times.

To repeat what I wrote yesterday, with period material, I would say emphatically yes- buy now, enjoy it for years, and sell it off when it no longer works for you. Moreover, I’d say this applies to anything established in the canon of the fine and decorative arts. Note that I said ‘canon’, because what has come off the boil has been contemporary material. This phenomenon is what I term the Luke Fildes effect. Who is Luke Fildes? Well may you ask, as this illustrates my point perfectly. Sir Samuel Luke Fildes was arguably one of the most celebrated, popular and highly paid artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His socialist realist style is perhaps best realized in a painting from the late 19th century, ‘The Doctor’, depicting a physician pondering how to treat a sick child in a poor crofter’s cottage. Well drafted with a clear narrative content, it is, however, miles from anything currently thought fashionable.

Don’t dismiss fashion, as it as strong an influence in the fine as it is in the decorative arts. Whatever critics may embrace in terms of the fine arts, they are nevertheless trapped in time as we all are, and what looks au courant today may look like a buggy whip tomorrow, no matter in what sort of critical framework it was grounded.

I am not dismissing the importance and influence of criticism. Would we know Jackson Pollock had there been no Clement Greenberg to champion him- in suitably abstruse language, of course.

This is Friday, and I am off to an auction view, so let me bring this to a quick close. I can, of course, because the advice I’m proffering is what you’ve always heard, and it is of sufficiently few characters to be contained in a ‘Tweet’- where contemporary art is concerned, buy what you like within your own budget. For when buying art outside the canon, where value and fashion are concerned, what is a ‘sleeper’ today might next year appear as sick as Luke Fildes’ patient.

The recession is over, so you know. That’s what the Fed is telling us, anyway, and making this determination using a variety of (arcane) measurements. My frontline assessment is conditioned by whether or not I’ve written an invoice today. When not, I am inclined to agree with my sainted grandmother whose folk aphorism, expurgated for the delicacy of my devoted readers, was that it is hard to appreciate the daylight when you’ve fallen into the privy.

With all that, we do seem to be clawing our way out- of the economic privy- although it is hard to tell in the antiques trade, with the epidemic of gallery closures hardly abating. The auction houses, which should derive some benefit from stock disbursals the result of closures, are yet in trouble, with relatively few buyers and not enough consignments to make operations profitable. But therein are the green shoots, actually, because amongst the dross, goods that are of fine quality and fresh to the market are garnering significant attention (read ‘selling for big money’).

This is the thing that we’ve seen all along, even in the darkest days, with the good goods selling, and the mediocre material just sitting there. This is hard for all of us to communicate to clients, who immediately assume that anything offered for sale, either privately or at auction, is necessarily a distressed sale. That has exacerbated already tough trading conditions, because our clients, who are in the market only when the spirit moves them, do not see movement within the trade to the point of vivacity if a piece is truly worthwhile. In spite of its overall decimation, trust me, there are still plenty of trade buyers out there. As a consequence, it is doubtful that a private buyer, either collector or interior designer, will even in this environment acquire a ‘sleeper’.

The better pieces are still, then, with alacrity being acquired for resale by the trade. What buyers need to consider is that, if the beige book is right, while one may not necessarily find a bargain out there, when the green shoots become in the fullness of time the tree branches of economic recovery, one might regret not having made a purchase right now.

What I hope people are cottoning on to, and what was sadly ignored as it was begun to be put about during our current economic malaise, is the notion of antiques as the ultimate in recycled goods. As we all of us begin to recover and feel a bit sunnier about the state of the economy, this is worthy of consideration, whilst also bearing in mind that all things ‘green’ may not actually be so.

If you are like me, ‘green’ and ‘recycled’ immediately call to mind someone in a beat-up pickup unsafely loaded with flattened fibreboard boxes, or a street-type pushing a shopping cart filled with dirty glass bottles. While notionally if not aesthetically similar to aluminum cans, and fibreboard, it’s worth noting the reuse of our antiques requires considerably less in inputs and remanufacturing to render them usable. Actually, very little is required, and mostly in the renewable elbow grease department- tighten the joints and a buff and polish- I am simplifying but you get the idea- and they are ready to go and will enjoy generations of service. Actually, with proper care, about 100 years of service, before another round of restoration is required.

I am put in mind of all this just now, as a lady and gentleman stopped in on Saturday, astonished at the (low) pricing of good quality period material relative to the reputedly good quality modern furniture they’d looked at the day before. Our stock is less expensive, yes, and of recognizably better quality. Of course, it would be, with the beautifully figured timbers and veneers, all derived from old growth timbers harvested 2 or 3 centuries ago, mellowed with a patina that likewise takes centuries to achieve. This, clearly, and we haven’t even begun to consider carving, joining, and other features of fine craftsmanship that are a given.

You have read all this before, in my blog and elsewhere, but what may make you feel even better about period pieces is a consideration that, when comparison shopping, a ‘green’ contemporary alternative may not be so. Even amongst ostensibly ‘green’ products made from sustainable materials, very few of these furniture pieces are made domestically, with most produced in the developing world. The upshot of this is, a considerable amount of waste ensues due to production using unskilled, unsupervised labor. One of the best and traditionally vaunted makers with factories formerly in High Point, North Carolina, now manufactures almost exclusively in Vietnam- and rejects for flaws in the range of 3 out of every 4 pieces produced there. And the rejects? Used as fuel. In fact the company is proud of its record for not using fossil fuels- in spite of the wasted product that ends up going up the smokestack and into the atmosphere.

To be continued…