My perception of culture (being almost entirely composed of Batman, sushi dives, forgotten LPs and the creation and history of all manner of fine arts), albeit diverse, has never breached that bizarre gulf between dollar store chic and ACTUAL chic - but I’ve managed to fool myself and everyone in my immediate vicinity well enough. Sure, I’ve meandered through the dusty hallways of indoor ‘antiques malls’ and found a thing or two that caught my eye, but there’s absolutely no comparison between that experience and the experience of tiptoeing between the displays at the 54th Annual Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory, near the Hunter College main campus in NYC.

I say ‘tiptoe’ because any manner of more casual walking might result in a mis-step or a stumble that would cost the traipser upwards of a half million dollars. Just breathe too hard on that tapestry and spend the rest of your life paying for it.

In summation, the Show was the precise equivalent of a museum that you could buy - no more and no less. Well, maybe a little more, because you could touch anything that you pretended to be interested in buying without those uppity museum guards being all up in your face. Every fine work of art or historical, anthropological artifact that you’ve ever seen in a public museum had a similar counterpart that you could purchase and bring home to your private collection. There’s something fascinating about knowing the exact collectors’ value for an ancient Greek bust, or a chair that might look like absolutely nothing special to the casual viewer. Little did I know that chairs are actually pretty big business, and seeing so many in one place, in all forms of disrepair, began to reveal the diversity and cost of things that are designed to be in frequent close contact with your butt. Prices would reveal to me that the older the butts, the better. Imagine the value of things meant to lovingly cup even more appealing body parts.

One thing that emerged from the weekend was the revelation that all of the most valuable things, and the most tremendously beautiful, all had the common factor that they were made by hand, made by skilled craftsmen, and made using arts that are almost all lost to the advent of industrialization. Did the Industrial Revolution ruin craft? Did it somehow completely change the value, and meaning, of art itself, and did it redefine the idea of the artistic ‘product’? For every ancient Greek bust, there’s now another that can be cheaply mass produced with alarming accuracy by injecting plastics into a mold and cranking it out, and for a good handful of collectors and decorators who collect for aesthetics alone, it would hardly make a difference.

The distinction here is that the kind of collector who buys things at The Winter Antiques Show will only settle for the genuine artifact - so in their own ridiculously opulent way, they keep the value of the artist and his artifacts alive. I readily admit that I had moments of resentment as buyers casually wrote out $400,000 checks for fireplaces and chandeliers (and this is no exaggeration, but a recollection of an actual occurrence), as I struggle to keep my car together and repay my student loans, but this is also the class of people who can afford an endorse the arts that I try to create. If I weren’t an ‘artist’, I might just remain resentful - but there is a purpose for all things that I’m only now able to appreciate, however decadent. I came home wanting to make things - genuinely craft them using the patience and techniques of forgotten craftsmen. Yeah, even if someone wasn’t going to drop ninety thousand dollars on it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to convince any of the wealthy couples to bring me home with them.

Each vendor, assembled from around the world, had a specialty - from medieval swords and armor, to period paintings and furnishings, and a few especially interesting areas that focused on tribal artifacts, from Eskimo to African. Of the weekend’s trio of shows that I attended, this was the largest and most expensively decorated, with a starting price of $10,000 on any given item (but often much, much more), and classical music piped in from a hidden speaker system. For anyone thinking of attending, ditch the jeans. The NYC elite are forever clad in funereal all-black, which is the only thing that them and I have in common. I was not made to feel unwelcomed, and was allowed to shoot photos at most of the sellers’ areas, but it was also very apparent that The Sale took precedence over any casual onlooker’s gawkings. If I was going to make a million dollar sale, I’d pretty much ignore everything else too.

Of my personal points of great interest (yours may differ), London’s Peter Finer was especially wonderful. Of course, seeing a Germanic sword taller than myself from across the showroom floor is enough to draw any nerd with hero fantasies in. The booth (though I hesitate to call any of these sturdy, fancy areas a word as classless as ‘booth’) also had dueling pistols given by Napoleon, cannons, armor, and amazing crossbows. I didn’t want to betray my ignorance by asking if they were still functional, but as an archer of poor-to-moderate skill, they captured my imagination. Intricate models of sailing ships also decorated the area.

The well-known Bauman Rare Books (from NYC) was also an interesting stop, and one of the first things to catch my eye was a book signed by Ayn Rand, which was selling for significantly more than my own copy. Books signed by A. A. Milne and Seuss made the biggest impression, and their library-like arrangement made me feel right at home.

Canada’s Donald Ellis Gallery featured a wide and well-displayed collection of Eskimo artwork and ceremonial masks (though politely declined posting prices for most of these items). As a one-time resident of Alaska, I looked for some kind of childhood emotional resonance, but while I didn’t find any, the items themselves were beautiful, and I’m almost positive that I recognized one from an old postcard in my collection. Kevin Conru featured an equally beautiful and artistically-displayed collection of African artifacts of a similar nature. All of these items I’ve mentioned can be seen in our Community Section, in galleries that will grow as I add more photographs. There are only about 500 to sort through and tag.
The other two antiques shows of the weekend each had a distinct feeling to them, mostly gauged by my levels of comfort with the other clientele and the average price of the items for sale. Needless to say, I favored the one where I actually spied two robots and a guy wearing a pair of jeans - though not all at once, else I might have fallen to my knees and wept. Stay tuned!

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Article Tags: A.A. Milne, Annual Winter Antiques, Armory, artifacts, Ayn Rand, Bauman Rare Books, Donald Ellis Gallery, Peter Finer, vendors

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 1:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, decorating, events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.