Antique Collectors as Canaries – Welcome to the Coal Mine

In the world of business, from my tiny perch as a communications consultant, nothing surprises me any more. In the world of antiques, from my tiny perch as a collector and sometime dealer, nothing surprises me anymore.

If you have a job that you go to every day and have the luxury of knowing that scenario is going to continue for the foreseeable future. Count yourself lucky. You’re one of the fortunate ones. You have some occupational certainty in your life.

It seems to me, antique collectors, not to mention communication consultants, are like the canary in the coal mine. The first subtle frisson of gas in a mine and the canary does a swan dive to the bottom of the cage. 

OK it's not a canary but the closest I had in the photo archive!

Collectors like to collect. Passionately. And I don’t care what you collect. If you’re passionate, hooked, you’re going to act on that passion, poor economy or not.   

But a key point here is the degree to which collectors continue to collect and at what cost?  Should you spend that $10,000 on a very good cupboard? Pull the trigger on that $4,000 folk art painting? Is the time right for that $2,500 top-notch bucket stand? How about shelling out $3,000 for a stellar piece of decorated stoneware? Or, does one keep the money liquid in a cashable GIC – even if it’s earning next to nothing in interest? Some collectors will buy. Some will not.  There are lots of good things to collect for less than $1,000 – maybe that’s where everyone has gone to play.

A point to make here is that collectors like a good deal as much as the next person. Once armed with knowledge and experience, collectors put their noses to the ground and start searching for antiques and collectables – especially ones that can be had for a bargain or for prices at below market value. The majority of collectors also dabble on the sell side of the market and making a tidy profit on a flea market find is a bonus that can occur frequently.  Again, in this economy, for most of us extra dollars are welcome.

I think it’s obvious that there aren’t as many collectors now as they’re used to be. Maybe the new collectors are all off searching for and collecting “mid century modern” items, advertising and nostalgia or whatever, thus leaving the country furniture domain populated mostly with dotty seniors, including myself, wandering about their houses noting inventories on their smart phones facing the uncomfortable prospect of what to do with these prized collections in their declining years. 

Of course if you’re sitting on heaps of money, enough to make you and your family financially secure, then all these points and counter points I’m making are irrelevant. Those with bags of moola are free to indulge in their collecting passion without constraint.  Still, folks with the deepest pockets are often the ones that don’t like taking a loss, ever. And, they also like a bargain as much as anyone.

However, if you are on a budget, like most of us, you’re going to face the balancing act - to buy or not to buy. Not surprisingly even in the face of uncertainty, collectors will often opt to purchase. The urge to own a particular piece is often too strong to ignore and damn the consequences.

Leaving the economy and financial circumstances aside, collectors desire objects that have character, colour, uniqueness, rarity, strong graphics, visual appeal, good design, form, age and provenance, none of that should surprise anyone. It’s what we all look for in antiques. Good things sell. Very good things sell quickly. And excellent things sell instantly. It’s the price at which they sell that is the moving target.

Of course when objects that meet that criteria, in whatever category, appear on the market they usually sell. What that leaves behind is the inferior objects and lots of them. There is more and more of the below average on the market. Those are objects that prove difficult to sell especially in a sluggish economy. So, there they sit taking up space in shops, stores, flea markets and anywhere else where marginal antiques and collectables are stored, frustrating the advanced collector and confusing the beginner. Heck, in this market even pretty good items languish in the shops and booths of the dealers.

Where is this all going to end? I certainly don’t know. I like most collectors, continue to pursue the hunt, spending what available dollars I have on antiques and folk art.  The thrill of the hunt, the discovery and the acquisition is the equation I love to solve, over and over again. 

The economy may be doubtful. Harsh events may be just around the corner. I don’t want to think about things at that level. I can’t do anything about it.  What I can do is enjoy the simple yet exciting pleasure of discovering more of this great country’s material history and adding these items to a small collection which brings joy and satisfaction on a daily basis.

Perhaps in preserving items of the past, I am doing some good at a minute level. That’s the philosophy I am going with and I think it’s a pretty solid one given all the other nonsense that’s happening around us.

Further, at the risk of extending this notion too far, I’d suggest that if we all spent more time studying and enjoying art and antiquities that our world would be a better, saner, more peaceful place in which to live. Not that that's going to happen, regrettably, any time soon.

Vision, Quality, Fads and the Frivolous

When I first started to collect country items (furniture, decorated stoneware, traditional folk art and early nostalgia) were pretty much the only games in town.  Certainly formal antiques were a factor too but they were considerably up market, at least it seems to me now, from country furniture and the related accessories I collect.

Today, in addition to the above collecting categories, we have: imports from seemingly everywhere, industrial, mid century, 50’s style, deco, teak, contemporary folk art, shabby chic, country style, mission, arts & craft, art nouveau and likely a bunch more collecting categories that I can’t think of at the moment.

It’s perhaps human nature that we continue to be preoccupied about the design of the environments in which we live and work and want to find new ways to incorporate special objects into our lives and have them close to us. Further, we put a monetary value on such items and in a free enterprise society, many people build businesses on the basis of buying and selling these objects. 

  

"AltamiraBison" by Rameessos - Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AltamiraBison.jpg#/media/File:AltamiraBison.jpg

 If an object or work of art has true quality in its design and form, it will stand the test of time and be recognized as such. However, this isn’t a transition that happens in isolation. It’s a big, messy, often confusing collecting world out there and if you’re in the middle of it, actively participating as a collector or dealer, you’re going to witness the comings and goings of trends, be it a the local antique mall, auctions, flea markets or in the booth next to you at an antique show.

On occasion, it takes a visionary to recognize quality and to take action which is quite often the start of a trend toward collecting a specific set of objects or work by a certain artist or artists.

Edith Halpert (1900 - 1970) was ridiculed when she opened a gallery where she included modern art downstairs, traditional folk art upstairs and counted among her early and longstanding supporters, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller who Halpert assisted in building an impressive collection of folk art. Not only were her folk art offerings deemed unworthy by the majority of collectors but geographically she opened her gallery in a decidedly non-gallery area of New York City – SoHo - the short form of the phrase South of Houston Street. 

  

In their time, the great American industrialist collectors Mellon, Flick, Havemeyer felt the only important thing to collect were the “old masters”. It took visionaries like Gertrude Stein and more importantly her brother, Leo Stein, to recognize and promote the artistic genius of Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse and others. But even they avoided artists, George Braque among them, who went on to acclaim.

Shaker furniture and accessories are among the most sought after antiques in the USA, yet there was no interest in them until 1923 when Edward and Faith Andrews began to document and collect the furniture and accessories of this dwindling utopian sect.  The Shakers designed and constructed some of the most beautiful furniture and accessories ever made by human hands.

"Hannah Cohoon, Tree of Life or Blazing Tree, 1845" by Hannah Cohoon - made in 1845 - http://www.afanews.com/articles/item/1641-a-cutwork-tree-of-life-in-the-manner-of-hannah-cohoon#.Uy8LfIXJH4A. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hannah_Cohoon,_Tree_of_Life_or_Blazing_Tree,_1845.jpg#/media/File:Hannah_Cohoon,_Tree_of_Life_or_Blazing_Tree,_1845.jpg

In the 1940’s, the Second World War drove many notable artists out of Paris to the United States thereby effectively transferring the centre of the art world from the “city of light” to the “city that never sleeps”.  Arguably, it has remained there ever since.

When art critic Clement Greenberg (1909 - 1994) coined the phrase “abstract expressionism”, he was describing the work of Jackson Pollack and his contemporaries who rose to prominence in the mid 1940’s and 50’s.

They continued on with much notoriety with the help of art promoter Peggy Guggenheim until the early 1960’s when a strangely wigged commercial artist from Pittsburg, Andy Warhola, his name later shortened by a publishing error to Warhol, began silk screening repeated images of modern cultural items and famous individuals onto canvas and a new movement, Pop Art, began.

Warhol knew, perhaps better than any other artist or gallery owner, the importance of promoting his own work. And he did so with great gusto.

Art has an advantage over antiques in that, as a medium, it is perhaps more broadly accepted albeit not necessarily understood by the public at large. This is do in part to the mass media, who respond to the perennial hype of international auction houses by regularly reporting on the sale of the next Van Gogh or Picasso or similar iconic painting for multi millions of dollars.

Rare is the individual who recognizes the genuine new movement at the time of its creation. In your collecting career, you may not be that individual and that’s fine. What you can be however is a collector who understands as best you can why certain antiques and art are so desirable in whatever category you choose to collect. Avoid fads and the frivolous. Train yourself to recognize quality and be prepared to pay for it. You won’t regret it – ever.