notes

As Keith troubled me a moment ago for an invoice form, it occurred to me that so far this year, we’ve made quite a number of small sales. Mind you, we are glad of anything that brings in a bit of the ready, but what has eluded us are the serious purchases from collectors and interior designers.

This phenomenon is apparent to Keith, as well. He is the one with the keys to the chequebook, so he is reminded more frequently than I about our plethora of receivables for antique pieces for what he calls ‘little money.’ This starts to sound like whingeing, because for each small sale we make, the client has looked at something, sometimes many things, for a lot more money. We look on this with optimism, as it, in our opinion, portends demand that due to the uncertain economic environment, presently manifests itself as a small purchase but promises a larger purchase, once the economy has achieved if not significant recovery then at least straight and level flight.

Interestingly, while the average invoice size has been small, the larger invoices have been to interior designers who seem now to be back in the marketplace. My twenty or so devoted readers will know this is unusual for us, with our private collectors our typical mainstay. Our largest sale so far attributable to the Los Angeles Antiques Show was to an interior designer, and one of our best design clients, sadly silent in the last few months, is now making noises like he has some business for us in the offing. May his tribe increase.

The numbers of individual sales and the apparent return to health of the interior design trade might bode well for the immediate future in the antiques and fine art business, but I wouldn’t go so far to say that it is otherwise portentous. Lately, for every sale we make, there have been two or three near misses- sales that somehow have gone awry, or invoices wherein the buyer has actually reneged. Forget the H1N1 flu virus- there has existed since late last year a pandemic of cold feet amongst buyers. While it may be on the wane, new cases crop up at Chappell & McCullar daily. For the moment, we must content ourselves with the ‘little money’.

I had a brief word earlier today with a good client of ours- someone who has purchased the entire panoply of Chappell & McCullar material- English antique pieces, two pieces from our Contemporary Classics range, and several paintings. With homes in several locations, she is kind enough to stop in when she’s in town, but, otherwise, she misses out on our email blasts. She told me she does do email, but as it’s normally accessed through her iphone, images are often lost to her. With her travel, she accesses her email via computer only once a week or so. What to do? She’s asked us, consequently, to dial technology back a decade or so, and send her via snail mail images of antiques and artwork we think might be of interest to her. And this morning, that is what we did.

In an object-based industry, of course, nothing ever completely substitutes for tactile contact. To alter a well-worn phrase, one look is worth a thousand images. This applies at least as much to 18th century English antiques as it does to painting. While the subtle variation of form and color wrought by a particular glaze or brushstroke might be occluded in even the best digital image, color and figuring on a well-patinated piece of walnut or mahogany is nearly impossible to communicate without first-hand inspection.

But, given the world we now inhabit, communication must always in the first instance be electronic. For all the clients with whom we deal regularly, what has piqued their interest was the digital image of an object we had sent them. Moreover, I am not aware of anyone who now trades with us that did not, in advance of their first visit, acquaint themselves with us and our stock in trade by a browse on our website. Although we don’t make many initial sales based on images found on our website, subsequent sales occur that way. What seems to happen is that the initial piece forms something of a benchmark for the client, with the client as a consequence satisfied that pieces purchased subsequently are accurately represented by the images we send them. Thinking metaphorically, we can all tell the difference between, say, a recorded piano recital and a live one. However, if once we’ve heard a Garrick Ohlsson concert live, we can certainly enjoy one in recorded form.

What, then, might seem an ostensible clash of cultures, conflating an experience of 18th century material culture with the technology of 2009, the seemingly infinite adaptability of humanity renders this clash moot. The aesthetic and intellectual experience of mimesis that Aristotle identified two and a half centuries ago is now with as great an effect as ever to be had on a computer screen.

I happened to notice this morning that a gentleman was taking a piece out of the  antiques gallery of a near-neighbor. With all of us so crowded together in the mid-19th century commercial enclave that composes Jackson Square, it is hard to keep any secrets. I say this by way of an explanation for those of you who think, as close-watchers of the neighbors that Keith and I have become what we call in England ‘curtain twitchers.’ If we were to so become, we would, without doubt, move somewhere where our neighbors were more, shall we say, comely.

The gentleman who was coming out of the gallery was, moreover, someone I recognized. His wife and he are Angelenos, but stop in from time to time on the way to their home in the Napa Valley. Most recently, I had seen them at the Los Angeles Antiques Show, making a few quick forays through our stand. They kept returning to the same item, but never lingered long enough for me to engage with them. I have had to learn, and Keith continues to remind me, that one doesn’t pounce on gallery visitors, who find my heretofore practiced car salesman’s technique somewhat off-putting. While we try to be quietly watchful, those browsers really interested do tend to declare themselves.

Or so I’ve always thought. The item the gentleman, a lawyer, looked at repeatedly was something we’ve had in inventory for several years and it will go on our sales page in a few days time. As a lawyer, he is not a shrinking violet, but I have to assume, with his repeated return, and repeated looking at the price card, he must have been interested, but overcome by the price. Moreover, the price must have been so much higher than he wanted to pay that he was put off even making an inquiry.

This represents a lesson for us always that, right now, we need to relearn- if it is for sale, price it to sell. Buyers are so skittish at the moment that it is the easiest thing in the world for them to talk themselves out of the purchase. As an example, we’ve had weeklong negotiations recently over a matter of a few hundred dollars on a $6,000 table- last year, the same client spent $20,000 on another piece without batting an eye. However, we did come to terms with this gentleman, and invoiced him. A more striking example is that of a gentleman who made a six-figure purchase late last year. He inquired early this year about a low five-figure item, which he then said he would buy. We invoiced him, and within a day, he reneged- the first time that has ever happened to us- saying he just couldn’t justify spending the money. Clearly, he’d talked himself out of the purchase.

Although I hope a few of my devoted readers take in my last blog entry and realize that now is a good time to make a good buy, my own obligation to clients is clear- make sure that the price on the price-tag is reasonable in the here and now, not the six months ago.

By the way, any of you who read my blog who are not registered with us as private clients, please do so and get first notification of our 4th Annual Summer Sale.

‘If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.’ Countless times my mother repeated this old chestnut to me in my (now long departed) youth. The point, of course, was to teach my sister and I to deal with the here and now- not expend energy on the wish it were otherwise. My mother is a child of the Great Depression. She learned and never forgot its hard lessons and wanted to communicate them to her progeny. As much as I sought to ignore these lessons, mercifully some of what she had to say stuck.

Times being the way they are, those of us who intend to come out of this relatively whole have had to become coldly pragmatic, with strategies that are more in line with what we need to do to get through the month than positioning ourselves to take advantage of perceived opportunities. Perception can, of course, be the mis-perceived and wished-for, occluding good judgement and clear thinking. We are having to cope with one particularly overwhelming mis-perception on nearly a daily basis.

Specifically, with everyone scrambling to stay afloat financially there is a perception that extraordinary items of personal property will be dumped in great numbers on the market, and available for pennies on the dollar. This kind of thing happened in the Great Depression, didn’t it?, where the Duveens and the Wildensteins of the world were able to acquire wonderful pieces of fine and decorative artwork from the newly impoverished.

In the art market, as in most other things, a consideration of the then and now, with so many variables, renders any comparison specious. In the art market, the rare and wonderful in existence now is, to a great extent, what was in existence then and, have you noticed? there are more people, and more moneyed people in more places now than there were then. Consequently, with that which has always been in finite supply, when blended with the greater numbers who seek the rare and beautiful, becomes as a consequence even rarer. A bargain is always seen by those in the art market channels (read ‘an art and antiques dealer’) and is snapped up before it ever sees the light of day. Think about it- with the numbers of public disbursal sales that have occurred in recent weeks, what was on offer ranged from the mediocre that was, shall we say, ‘shoppy’, to the somewhat better than mediocre. By this I mean, what was for sale was what no one really had wanted anyway. The best goods had already been sold off or placed with another dealer. Bargain prices? If something sells at auction for its appropriate value, even if it is less than the previous owner was asking for it, that doesn’t represent therefore a bargain purchase: it merely indicates that it was formerly overpriced.

Unfortunately, there seems to be this pervasive notion that bargains are to be had, even though none are forthcoming. Consequently prospective buyers are in fact missing out on what bargains there really are. To wit, an art and antiques dealer might now accept a little less for good material than he would otherwise. Note, however, that I said ‘good’ material, because the great material the dealer will oftentimes already have sold off, or will hold on to. Or, for instance, he might be willing to broker a sale on a commission basis rather than purchase an item outright and hold it for resale. That, of course, is quite a bit of what Duveen did during the Great Depression, and his buyers finally cottoned on to the fact that Duveen was still the go-to guy for fabulous artwork. That, in a nutshell, is the message. Now, as then, it is the art and antiques dealer that will have, and to whom one should apply, for the ‘bargain.’

That the trade is slow is not news to anyone in the art market, be you merchant of any stripe, from wall art to English antiques. The disbursal sales we’ve attended make that clear. With quite a bit of material at the final clear outs unsold, or selling at low estimates you have gathered, therefore, that with limited commissions earned, the auction business is still tough sledding, too.

Although material more within the canon, both fine and decorative art, composes the Chappell & McCullar oeuvre, we are still sufficiently close to the world of contemporary material to gain a sense of the weather there. Frankly, while it may be shall we say inclement here, it is the mother of all storms there. When a body thinks about it, it isn’t terribly surprising. As with the 18th century material that forms our corpus, fine quality 20th century material is pretty rare. As Poillerat, Printz and Nakashima pieces were not mass produced, these one-offs have often commanded more at auction than a period piece of similar outline with an illustrious provenance and attributable to a vaunted maker. Moreover, with a limited supply and, for a while, frenetic demand, dealers oftentimes began to offer what was, frankly, kitsch of the Murano glass and Heywood Wakefield furniture variety. Assuming you wanted to turn your living space into a 1950’s TV room, this is, then, okay. But the question was inevitably begged- why purchase 1950’s kitsch, if that is your perverse desire, when you can buy the same thing- new- for less money. The penny dropped for me a year or so ago when a young man looked at a piece of midcentury design in our own galleries, and asked a question I couldn’t answer. ‘Why,’ he queried, ‘would a person buy a worn-out Eames chair when the new one is exactly the same, made by the same maker?’ Good question. Knoll and Herman Miller pieces from retail and online outlets like Design Within Reach are low-anxiety purveyors of 20th century design, and on a budget.

One of the better dealers in mid-century furniture, whose handled material is in the Poillerat, Printz and Nakashima caliber, told us several years ago how difficult it was to sell his stock profitably, as the auction houses were the market makers and, with their databases of sold lots as accessible as their online catalogs, everyone in the world could see what a dealer had paid for their stock. Indeed, a fair old amount of the record setting auction prices were set by, wait for it, dealers buying for stock. Not surprising, a fair old bit of that record setting material is now finding its way back into the auction galleries. Any new records in the offing on the second go-around? No breath-holding, please.