Monday blues

It has been a most difficult year and I don't imagine I will be feeling much better in the coming weeks. I feel like the last great betamax or buggy whip salesman in America. All well and good but they're just not making or buying either these days.

Of course I knew this day would come, was writing about the incoming storm of indifference about twenty years ago. Cassandra never won any special door prize for her prescience, I don't suspect there is one waiting for me either.

I was looking at auction records for an important woodblock artist I used to regularly sell for $1500 to $2500 last week. She now can't fetch much more than $300. Gearhart is still strong, everybody else in the oeuvre is suffering, not sure why? Same with Native American baskets, I have seen baskets that once sold for a quarter of a million dollars now sell for less than a tenth or fifth or twentieth of that. 

Insert any area of collecting, save god awful, post modern, conceptual blecch and you will hear a similar story. Oriental rugs, antique Japanese, sterling silver, Ethnographic, African, what have you. Even some of the better names in mid century modern have become diminished in today's market.

What changed?

Well, the collectors aged out, went to homes or to their final repose. At a certain level the advanced collectors know far more than anybody about the material, including the dealers and when they die there is no one to take their place. Their kids aren't interested and the collector's institutional knowledge is gone forever.

Antique shows don't exist much anymore. I used to do about 15 per year, that number is a small fraction today. If there is still one up and running it is living on fumes, like the dealers. Won't be long now. Dealers are looking at Round Top in Texas as their last salvation but it is an awfully long way to go and I understand that it is having its own problems. Chicago, Houston, Del Mar, so many gone, Miami a shadow of its former self.

When I was a kid, I would walk through SOHO in New York and see the greatest little antique shops. Same in Laguna and Los Angeles. Find a legitimate antique shop today, anywhere.  Walking into an "antique mall" today is a very sad experience, practically nothing to see of any redeeming value. 

The internet is another problem. I was talking to a friend about one of the super buyers of my time, having not seen her in years. He said that he saw her in Los Angeles recently, said she doesn't have to go to shows because she can pick off anything that looks remotely interesting on Etsy, eventually filling her quiver from some ignorant dealer. Everything is online and accessible and hence, rapidly receding in perceived value and unable to appreciate.

That is another thing, the fact is that without dealers and a little magic, markets in anything usually lose their luster and interest. I passed on a Spratling sterling silver pitcher the other day that I would have jumped on with hands and feet five years ago. Because we can solve every problem but a lack of interest and Generations X,Y and Z, to their collecting parents' chagrin, could frankly care less.

They know little of history, or art history for that matter and the television or media silo in which they get their information has been telling them nonstop that clutter is the enemy which they need to go to therapy to guard against, that "things" are bad for them, monastic minimalism the only path forward. The demarcation line is 1950 forward, now pushing to 1980 and nothing from earlier periods, or god forbid centuries, is acceptable in the new design lexicon.

They only feel comfortable now in homes that they see depicted on their television screens and if it means that every home in American will have an imitation Eames chair and ottoman well, so be it, way to assert your design independence.

I've had a good run and a lot of fun. I know most of the people still standing, at least on the West Coast but throughout America. We all made a lot of money once upon a time. Sold beautiful things, Rookwood and Amphora, deco and nouveau, Maloof and what have you.

Days are gone. Shows are so few and far between that you have to hit the mark on every one and that is just not practically possible. No room for error. So you end up eating your seed corn and maybe forced to living in that big white van you've carried your stuff around in one day. 

We dealers will soon go the way of the dodo or Bachman's warbler and find ourselves extinct. I never see a young dealer anymore, and the sad fact is that I am on the younger side of the curve amongst my peers. Saw a Russian gent I did shows for for decades at the swap meet, he no longer has the inventory to go back inside if he wanted to. We started on the pavement and my guess is that we will end up back there. 

Perhaps we will rate a brass monument someday or a plaque on a discarded piece of Sascha Brastoff, Dealers; they laid down their money and time promoting the long dead pursuit of beautiful decorative arts, please remember their memory kindly.