Bird flees the cage

Today I decided to go cruising for antiques. I am going to be a captive audience for a while starting next week and thought I would test my wings and get away. I rarely shop anymore and depend mostly on other dealers, customers, pickers and estate sale people to bring me things.

When I first started in the business about 16 years ago, I was a shopping fool, no antique shop, thrift store or possible turn was left unstoned. I cut my teeth on the back roads of America, from Maine to Florida and all parts in between.

Things changed in the late nineties. The advent of the internet drastically cut down on merchandise in the shops, both from spreading relevant information to the uninformed and the use of ebay. Things that we thought were once rare became decidedly less so when Aunt Martha in Dubuque found one in her dresser and put it on line. This also had the unfortunate consequence of both taking the antique dealer out of the equation since objects went straight to end users and taking some of the mystique out of the biz that caused values to escalate in the first place.

There was once a time when I would tell one and all that you could drop me in any city in America with antique malls and five hundred bucks and I would make ten times the money in a month. Now I'm not so sure.

I coined an axiom once I call Robert's law and it goes something like this - we reject the art of our parents and we embrace the art of our grandparents. When I was starting, the people that were, for want of a better word, expiring, collected in the twenties and thirties, a fertile time. Now the estates we see are from people who collected in the fifties and sixties, dreary decades where the majority of good art was very scarce and inaccessible - who can afford a DeKooning painting or a Nakashima butterflied conoid table?

Kids today are sort of an Ikea lot, soundly rejecting the warmth of Victorian, Mission, Spanish Revival, and pretty much everything else short of chrome and paper lamps. The 18th and 19th century have ben relegated to the ashbin of history. Regurgitations of the disgusting seventies have been appearing for a few years (anyone want a Jack Daniel's coke mirror?) but the last couple decades of the twentieth century haven't shown me a lot. Fads quickly come and go (Dunbar, Parzinger, Duquette, anyone?) largely defined by a select gay subculture of aesthetic popes.

So I went shopping today, thinking that I would hit some malls in Redlands, Riverside and San Bernardino. I checked out Escondido earlier this week. And found nothing. Anywhere. Today I sauntered through scary little towns like Colton and Loma Linda, Rialto, Fontana, Grand Terrace, Perris and Highland. Probably once very nice places but the bloom long since gone from the bud. The Inland Empire gone to seed. Billboards for lusty gentleman's clubs beckon. Pawn shops galore hawking for cheap gold. Rehab cases in their twenties and thirties on spider bikes, scavenging anything that might offer any value like untouchables in Mumbai. Malls closing down all over the place - shops largely undistinguishable from Goodwills, Snoopy bathmats and velvet paintings. Weeds growing up outside dank shops where the merchandise never changes from decade to decade.

I know that I am a snob and that there are things that I would have bought twenty years ago that I wouldn't go near now but it's really sick out there. Things don't have to be expensive but there should be some element of good taste involved. And it's not just my region - I think the story is repeated throughout the country.

We have lost whole banks of institutional knowledge in some fields, oriental pottery coming first to mind, but european porcelain, pewter, empire furniture, there are lots of experts expiring with all of their knowledge and no one to replace them. There is an appalling lack of scholarship. Some reputable dealers never crack a book. Much of our great silver has been melted down unconsciously and cavalierly with the latest price rise in the commodity.

I have tended to focus on paintings and prints the last six or seven years. It will be certainly interesting to see if the current dismal economy will continue to support my vocation. I know that my shop is a special place and I say that with all the humility I can muster. I wish that more people would appreciate the treasures of our past. But also understand that the first order of business right now is food and shelter. I started out on the pavement and guess that I can maybe return one day. But think I would blow my brains out first.