artifacts

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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Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect – Join our Collectors’ Community!

Though most people would prefer to forget certain chunks of it, until you’re in your thirties education remains a prominent part of a person’s memory. Few people can remember pre-school events, which leaves everything until 18 — or early twenties, depending on how much college is done — dominated by thoughts of textbooks, friendships, schedules, and never-ending notetaking.

Collecting artifacts of school-years’ past is largely ephemeral, but could be as simple as stopping by your alma mater and dropping $10 for a t-shirt with the school’s mascot on it. Sports have long been a large connection between community and school, with specific events worth remembering. Booster clubs have long sold buttons, caps, shirts, and other school-related items as a way of raising money for uniforms or trips. Huge events, like winning a state or national title or some other record, comes with newspaper articles or other commemorative trinkets. Then, there’s the items belonging to the students, such as medals won, uniforms, and letters earned. Sports, however, aren’t the only event-related extracurriculars: plays, band concerts, forensics, and chess club all had competitions and performances, complete with posters, announcements, awards, and programs of their own.

If you weren’t the extracurricular type, there’s always grades. Report cards came out several times a year, resulting in a lot of paper that most parents saved and thus preserved. Old reports cards are relatively common, but looking for a particular year or school can take some time. Besides report cards, lots of ephemera — hall passes, teacher notes, lunch cards — are all collectible, and turn up from time to time in the bottom of a drawer or found being used as a bookmark.

Those interested in the history of a school can find loads of information in old school newspapers. Most upper-grade schools, and even some gradeschools, publish a newspaper on a regular basis. College newspapers are present on nearly every campus of higher learning, and all focus at least somewhat on school news and items of interest to the students. The grandaddy of school publishing is, of course, the school annual. Most schools — all the way down to Kindergarten these days — put out a bound book of students’ photos, names, and years. In the past, it was usually restricted to high school students, and sometimes in higher learning when the school was smaller or more specialized. These, like newspapers, can be a good source of historical information gleaned from the activities and event pages of the yearbook. When shopping for yearbooks, you do have a bit of competition, though: genealogists are looking for yearbooks for their own purposes of tracking family lineage, so prices are sometimes high.

Whether you’re reliving your glory days, or trying to connect with your grandfather’s youth, school is a good place to start. For more than a century, school has been a part of everyone’s life, and collecting parts of your own past is a rewarding way to hold on to memories of days gone by.

I was born around the right time, I have an affinity for science fiction, I’ve got an eBay account — but why don’t I collect Star Wars?

The first Star Wars toy I got was a sandspeeder, circa 1978, and nearly every birthday or Christmas after that point included Star Wars of some sort. I still have the sandspeeder around here someplace. My parents, the source of my packrat mentality, stored my and my siblings’ toys for decades, waiting for the eventual day that we come and pick up our stuff and take it to our own basements. A year or two ago, I did exactly that.

I’ve gone through all of it, sorted the broken from the intact, the bad from the good, and figured out which weapons go with which figures. Much to most action-figure collectors’ dismay, they’re not lined up on a shelf. I’ve got a couple boxes in the basement, loosely organized by type.

I sold a bunch of them on eBay. There was even a nice Weequay, still in its original package, that went on auction. A couple of the complete figures went under glass in our antique booth. My wife took all the Ewoks and claimed them for herself; they guard her computer monitor. The rest are lying around in boxes, waiting to be sold.

A lot of the recent interest in 80s artifacts is an attempt by those of us in our late 20s to early 30s who miss the items from their childhood and now have the money to buy them. GI Joe, Rainbow Brite, He Man, My Little Pony, Transformers: besides still being in production, they all have a new following for their old incarnations. People all over, in the US and overseas, and competing with their dollars to buy back their childhood, collect the toys that they broke or lost so long ago.

I admit, I’m a big packrat – I keep darn near everything. I have boxes of receipts, piles of computer junk, boxes of stuff I don’t know what it is but can’t part with. The toys, however, don’t even hold as much value as the box of PC power cords. Those I might have a use for. The toys, not nearly so.

My real collection is up on bookshelves, old leatherbound tomes; it’s the century-old oil paintings on the wall. It’s bits and pieces of ephemera, one-of-a-kind works of human art. The items in my collection may be old, but there’s no replacing them. Age and uniqueness has given the items a value, maybe not priceless, but worthy of being on a shelf for display.

The leftover toys, the rare ones that actually survived, are deserving of a garage sale. I played with them for years, I had my fun, I don’t need to buy that back again. Why do I need them now? I can’t even play with them like I did in my childhood; that’d ruin the value. A new-old toy, like a genuine tin windup from the 50s or a composite doll from the 1910s, is old in a good way. The toys from the 80s, mass-produced by the thousands and marketed with half-hour cartoons, are meant to be tossed out, disposable items in a fast-moving market.

A lot of my Star Wars toys aren’t really collector quality, so I probably won’t find buyers for them. I don’t particularly need to keep them, but if I hold onto them long enough they may find their way into a young collector’s hands years from now. The day will come when they will be revered as antiques, not as leftovers from a person’s forgotten youth. Until then, I won’t be displaying them. My Star Wars figures will be unceremoniously dumped into a box and stacked in the basement. I don’t need them; it’s not what I’m into right now.