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Ask Ben Anything
23 Plays2 years ago
Over the past couple weeks we’ve been fielding and compiling questions that listeners have put to host Benjamin Miller. A taste: “Has any object ever truly baffled you?” “What’s the best town for antiquing?” and “Will Curious Objects ever do an adults-only episode?” This week’s episode represents a taste of his own medicine for Ben, usually the interviewer, and offered a chance for us at The Magazine ANTIQUES to learn a little more about what the Curious Objects community puzzles over.
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Transcript
Introduction and Listener Interaction
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:08
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:10
Speaker
And today's Curious Object is... well, it's me.
00:00:14
Speaker
Okay, is that wildly narcissistic or what?
00:00:16
Speaker
But yeah, for the first time ever, we are doing an Ask Me Anything episode, which is inherently a little bit navel-gazing, I admit.
00:00:24
Speaker
But what the hell, it's the start of a new year.
00:00:26
Speaker
It was just my birthday.
00:00:28
Speaker
And, you know, honestly, as much as I love all of the conversations with guests, and I really do, but it's the listeners that really get me excited.
00:00:37
Speaker
And I promise I'm not just sucking up by saying that.
00:00:40
Speaker
I really wish often that there were more opportunity to bring listeners into the podcast conversation.
00:00:47
Speaker
We've done that once in a while, but I'm looking for more opportunities, and that's exactly what we're doing today.
Co-host Introduction: Sammy Delati
00:00:55
Speaker
So what we've done is ask listeners to pose their questions about anything, mostly antiques related, but really anything is fair game, to pose their questions to me, and I'm going to chat about it.
00:01:09
Speaker
But you might be wondering, okay, if Ben is the guest today, who's the host?
00:01:14
Speaker
Okay.
00:01:15
Speaker
Well, that, of course, is my intrepid producer.
00:01:18
Speaker
You've heard his name in the credits at the end of every episode of Curious Objects since the very beginning.
00:01:23
Speaker
That is Sammy Delati.
00:01:25
Speaker
Sammy, is this the first time listeners are hearing your voice?
00:01:28
Speaker
I was just trying to remember if I appeared on the Your Curious Object episode from, I think, 2018, 2018, 2019.
00:01:34
Speaker
But if not, then yes.
00:01:35
Speaker
This is an epic moment then.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, I like to think of myself as your most faithful listener, though I also probably offer more criticism than most.
00:01:51
Speaker
I really hope that no one has listened to the podcast more than you, because that would betray a degree of insanity.
00:01:59
Speaker
Right, and as many times, too.
00:02:01
Speaker
But, you know, you find new things every time you listen through.
00:02:04
Speaker
And I know some of the background stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor that...
00:02:10
Speaker
enrich my understanding of the objects in a way that some listeners don't even get to hear.
00:02:16
Speaker
So maybe some of those things we'll be revealing in this episode with these sort of behind-the-scenes questions.
00:02:22
Speaker
That is truly a very flattering way of putting it, enriching your understanding of the objects rather than having to sit through all of the less-than-presentable material that never makes it to error.
00:02:38
Speaker
Well, this is a public podcast, so I do have to be polite, I think.
00:02:42
Speaker
All right, fair enough.
00:02:43
Speaker
We'll be a little bit diplomatic, but this is going to be a sort of a no holds barred episode.
Recording with COVID: Commitment to Podcasting
00:02:49
Speaker
And actually, so I'm stuck at home right now with COVID.
00:02:52
Speaker
But if I weren't sick, I would definitely be downing shots of whiskey right now.
00:02:58
Speaker
So I'm just going to pretend that, you know, my faculties are compromised, that I'm a little, I'm going to loosen up a little and just, you know, just do some truth telling here.
00:03:12
Speaker
Sounds great, Ben.
00:03:14
Speaker
Should I take over?
00:03:15
Speaker
Let's get to it.
00:03:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:17
Speaker
What are we waiting for?
00:03:17
Speaker
Okay.
00:03:18
Speaker
Let me settle myself in the director's chair for once.
00:03:22
Speaker
I'm going to be doing my best impression of Johnny Carson or Letterman or who have you.
Journey into Art and Antiques
00:03:29
Speaker
So, we're going to start out with some background on you.
00:03:34
Speaker
You're Ben Miller, Director of Research at SJ Shrubsall, seller of Antiques Silver.
00:03:39
Speaker
You are yourself, beyond the confines of your job, a silver nut.
00:03:46
Speaker
I'll take that as a compliment.
00:03:48
Speaker
The listeners would really like to know a little bit more, such as whether
00:03:51
Speaker
Your line of work runs closer to that of Indiana Jones or that of a hawker on the street.
00:03:58
Speaker
If you do in fact own and sometimes wear George Washington's transcending all silver grill.
00:04:06
Speaker
And if you are indeed New York's most eligible bachelor, even if they're too shy to ask.
00:04:13
Speaker
So we will hopefully be answering almost all of the pressing questions about Benjamin Miller on this special episode of Curious Objects.
00:04:22
Speaker
And where we're going to start is the absolute beginning, and that is your upbringing, your education, how you got into the business.
00:04:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think that antiques, the whole world of antiques is like a lot of people end up in it for unconventional reasons and following very circuitous paths.
00:04:39
Speaker
And that's definitely true for me.
00:04:41
Speaker
But I realized recently that I actually do have an art and antiques origin story, which goes back to when I was five years old.
00:04:49
Speaker
And my parents were in Italy and brought me with them for the year while my dad was doing his PhD research there.
00:04:59
Speaker
And they dragged me around to every damn museum in the whole country.
00:05:02
Speaker
Now, today, of course, that would be a dream come true.
00:05:05
Speaker
But as a five-year-old, I was miserable.
00:05:08
Speaker
You know, how dare you drag me through every gallery?
00:05:12
Speaker
I mean, paintings are the most boring things I'd ever seen in my life.
00:05:16
Speaker
I had enough of it.
00:05:18
Speaker
I was sick and tired of it.
00:05:19
Speaker
I was whining, moaning, complaining.
00:05:21
Speaker
We were in Florence.
00:05:22
Speaker
We were at the Uffizi.
00:05:24
Speaker
wandering through the galleries and I was dragging my feet.
00:05:27
Speaker
I was, I'm sure I was kicking and screaming.
00:05:30
Speaker
And then
00:05:33
Speaker
We went into the room that has Botticelli's painting of the birth of Venus, you know, Venus rising out of the ocean on the clamshell.
00:05:42
Speaker
And apparently, I don't remember this, but my parents tell me that I walked up to that painting in a kind of trance-like state.
00:05:49
Speaker
And I looked up at it and I muttered, she's so beautiful.
00:05:57
Speaker
And maybe I should have known right then that I was destined for a life of, you know, aesthetic obsession.
00:06:05
Speaker
But it actually took a while into my career before I actually made that shift.
00:06:10
Speaker
You know, I worked in politics for a while.
00:06:11
Speaker
I did some journalism.
00:06:13
Speaker
I dabbled in.
00:06:14
Speaker
Even in like, you know, management consulting, it was kind of all over the place.
00:06:19
Speaker
And it really was almost by complete accident that I stumbled my way into the antique silver business.
00:06:26
Speaker
I had never looked at a piece of silver before in my life.
00:06:30
Speaker
I think I've told maybe bits and pieces of this story on the podcast over the years.
00:06:35
Speaker
But basically it boils down to, you know, I was sitting down at a bar one night and chatting with the guy next to me.
00:06:44
Speaker
And it turned out that he was an antiques dealer.
00:06:46
Speaker
We really hit it off.
00:06:47
Speaker
And somehow I talked him into hiring me.
00:06:51
Speaker
And what do you know, however many years later, I still work for him.
00:06:56
Speaker
Wow, a winding path.
00:06:58
Speaker
Your story about the birth of Venus reminds me that my favorite painting as a kid was a birth of Venus by some no-name 19th century French academician.
00:07:13
Speaker
But man, I can't believe that you complain about being dragged through all the museums of Europe.
00:07:19
Speaker
I mean, the epitome of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, and yet you're still not happy.
00:07:26
Speaker
Well, the irony is that the reason I was at all these museums was that my parents were too poor to afford a babysitter.
00:07:31
Speaker
So they had no choice but to bring me along no matter how much moping I did about it.
00:07:36
Speaker
All right.
00:07:37
Speaker
So you like to start out each episode with a series of rapid fire questions.
00:07:43
Speaker
And so we're going to likewise feed you some of your own medicine.
00:07:47
Speaker
Boy.
00:07:48
Speaker
I'm not even going to ask you if you're game.
00:07:49
Speaker
You just have to do it.
00:07:51
Speaker
So you agreed to this episode.
Treasured Possessions: Roman Coin and Caravaggio Painting
00:07:53
Speaker
I know I can dish it.
00:07:54
Speaker
We'll find out if I can take it.
00:07:55
Speaker
What's the oldest object you personally own?
00:07:59
Speaker
That's an ancient Roman coin, a silver coin from the reign of Septimius Severus, which is second century, third century AD.
00:08:10
Speaker
Wow.
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, pretty old.
00:08:12
Speaker
Did somebody try to pay for something at Shrub's Hall with that?
00:08:17
Speaker
I would have taken it.
00:08:18
Speaker
But no, it was a childhood gift from my dad.
00:08:21
Speaker
It's actually one of the first old things that I ever owned.
00:08:24
Speaker
Man, and I felt so special getting like silver dollars from my grandparents growing up.
00:08:29
Speaker
Well, you'd be surprised at how affordable a lot of these ancient Roman coins really are.
00:08:33
Speaker
They made an awful lot of them.
00:08:34
Speaker
Okay.
00:08:35
Speaker
Well, maybe you'll give it to me one day then.
00:08:37
Speaker
Don't get too excited.
00:08:39
Speaker
What's the most valuable object or artwork that you've ever touched?
00:08:42
Speaker
So that's actually an object that I encountered thanks to the Curious Objects podcast.
00:08:47
Speaker
It's the Caravaggio painting of Judith beheading Hold the Furnace that was discovered a few years ago in an attic in France.
00:08:55
Speaker
Right.
00:08:55
Speaker
And while you remember, we did an episode about that with Eric Turcan, the fellow who sort of researched and authenticated and sold the piece.
00:09:03
Speaker
Right.
00:09:04
Speaker
And that was sold for, I think the sum was undisclosed, but it was, you know, well into the eight or maybe even nine figures.
00:09:16
Speaker
And yeah, so I actually saw that painting and touched it.
00:09:19
Speaker
And that was pretty cool.
00:09:21
Speaker
Not just because it was so valuable, but really because it's an amazing, there's an amazing story behind it.
00:09:27
Speaker
And listeners, you should go listen to that in the Curious Objects archive.
00:09:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:33
Speaker
Does the work appreciate or depreciate because it has one of your fingerprints on it?
00:09:39
Speaker
Oh, well, I think that's probably a good 10% of the value of the painting.
00:09:43
Speaker
Okay, you're now banned from your current field and you have to pick a new specialty.
Alternative Career: Concert Pianist
00:09:48
Speaker
What would that be?
00:09:50
Speaker
Okay, so I've always liked it when I ask this question to listeners and they give me something totally out of left field that's like not even in the art or decorative arts world.
00:09:58
Speaker
So I'm just going to run with that and say I would be a concert pianist.
00:10:02
Speaker
Okay.
00:10:03
Speaker
I've heard some of your playing at your holiday get-togethers that you host in your apartment every year.
00:10:10
Speaker
And you keep the band together.
00:10:12
Speaker
Oh, after about a half a bottle of wine.
00:10:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's not necessarily me in my past.
00:10:18
Speaker
Anyway, I definitely am not talented enough to have a career as a concert pianist, but I would love to be.
00:10:24
Speaker
Well, who is?
00:10:25
Speaker
Okay, what is your favorite museum to visit?
Museum Preferences and Influences
00:10:30
Speaker
You know, I just have to give the most conventional possible answer to that question because it's the truth.
00:10:36
Speaker
It's the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
00:10:37
Speaker
It's a block from Shrub Soul where I go to work.
00:10:41
Speaker
And so I pop over there at lunchtime and I, you know, I've been there hundreds and hundreds of times and they're probably still entire rooms that I've never set foot in.
00:10:50
Speaker
But there's, it's a place I can go every day of my life and never get bored.
00:10:55
Speaker
You know, I had an office across from the New York Public Library for about one week and then corporate things happened and pretty soon I was over instead next to Penn Station.
00:11:08
Speaker
That's about the last place you want to be for a long time, though it is very lively.
00:11:12
Speaker
Yeah, plenty of curious people around there, maybe some curious objects.
00:11:18
Speaker
Okay, speaking of curious people, what artist or craftsperson, living or dead, would you invite to dinner?
Historical Dinner Guest: Paul Revere
00:11:26
Speaker
Well, you know, you could look at this from a couple of perspectives.
00:11:29
Speaker
One being, I want to know more about this artist or a craftsperson and what they achieved and how they did it.
00:11:35
Speaker
The other being, I just want like a bridge to an interesting moment in history.
00:11:39
Speaker
And maybe the person who can fulfill both of those interests for me is Paul Revere.
00:11:45
Speaker
The the the Patriot and the Midnight Rider, but also famously a silversmith.
00:11:51
Speaker
And he has the added benefit of having been an incredibly successful businessman, which to me suggests he was probably very charismatic.
00:11:58
Speaker
So I'm guessing he'd be excellent dinnertime conversation.
00:12:02
Speaker
A dip no sophist.
00:12:03
Speaker
OK, what's the first?
00:12:04
Speaker
A what now?
00:12:07
Speaker
A dip no sophist.
00:12:09
Speaker
What is that?
00:12:09
Speaker
Someone who is very good at table talk.
00:12:13
Speaker
Okay.
00:12:13
Speaker
I thought that being a sophist was a bad thing.
00:12:16
Speaker
Only to non-sophists.
00:12:18
Speaker
Gotcha.
00:12:19
Speaker
Okay.
00:12:20
Speaker
Well, I won't ask whether I'm one or not.
00:12:23
Speaker
Well, this conversation I think will reveal that.
00:12:27
Speaker
But it won't remove any possible damage.
00:12:29
Speaker
I'll let you know at the end.
00:12:31
Speaker
Oh, God.
00:12:32
Speaker
Okay.
00:12:33
Speaker
What was the last artwork or object that you saw that gave you shivers?
Art that Moves: Belizear and the Frey Children
00:12:38
Speaker
Yeah, so this question sets a very high bar, which is intentional when I ask people this, because making your body react physically to an artistic experience, I mean, that's rare, I think, for most of us, and it's powerful when it happens.
00:12:55
Speaker
And so to give that a full honest answer, it's the painting of Belizear and the Frey Children that we did a three-part episode about in the fall of 2022.
00:13:07
Speaker
And that painting was recently sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and they hung it about maybe six weeks ago in the American wing.
00:13:16
Speaker
So, yeah, I went to see it there.
00:13:18
Speaker
I've seen it there a few times now.
00:13:21
Speaker
They reframed it.
00:13:22
Speaker
It looks beautiful.
00:13:23
Speaker
And it's finally arrived in what I assume is going to be its permanent home.
00:13:30
Speaker
It's a really incredible painting with a really unbelievable story behind it.
00:13:35
Speaker
And standing in its physical presence just had a powerful effect on me.
00:13:41
Speaker
And by the way, a little treat for listeners, we are going to be doing another episode about this painting.
00:13:50
Speaker
because a lot has actually happened since the three-part series that we did.
00:13:55
Speaker
And particularly, I want to get into the sort of the afterlife, the postscript, the, you know, how did it make its way from the moment of discovery into the greatest museum collection in the country?
Antique Shopping Advice
00:14:08
Speaker
All right, so we are going to leave the section where Ben, you have had a little bit of control over the terms of engagement, and we're going to go into the questions that you receive from listeners on Instagram and email, whatever else.
00:14:25
Speaker
And I'm going to start out with a question from Liz.
00:14:27
Speaker
What is a common mistake people make when shopping for their first antique?
00:14:32
Speaker
Far and away the most common mistake that people make when they're shopping for antiques is not to do it.
00:14:36
Speaker
You should all shop for antiques, even if you don't know anything about antiques.
00:14:42
Speaker
It's super fun.
00:14:43
Speaker
And that could mean, you know, thrifting.
00:14:46
Speaker
It could mean going to a flea market or a little, you know, antique shop in the Hudson Valley.
00:14:53
Speaker
Or it could mean, you know, finding an auction house and bidding on something and having the excitement of competition and
00:14:59
Speaker
Just, you know, just break the ice.
00:15:01
Speaker
Get into it.
00:15:02
Speaker
You might hate it, but I think there's a pretty good chance that you'll like it.
00:15:06
Speaker
You'll find it fun.
00:15:07
Speaker
You'll find it engaging.
00:15:08
Speaker
And you might discover some types of objects that you never would have thought to seek out.
00:15:13
Speaker
And that's pretty cool.
00:15:15
Speaker
But the mistake that I see people making, and this is not just people shopping for their first antique.
00:15:21
Speaker
This, you know, I see this among even sometimes really experienced, like, top collectors.
00:15:28
Speaker
is shopping for price.
00:15:31
Speaker
And, you know, I get it.
00:15:33
Speaker
We all have a budget and we all want to get the most bang for our buck.
00:15:37
Speaker
And we've all been in that situation where we're looking at the list of items and sorting by price from low to high.
00:15:44
Speaker
You know, I do it too.
00:15:46
Speaker
But the fact of the matter is when you're looking for an antique,
00:15:51
Speaker
Ideally, you're looking for an object that you are going to keep and cherish and treasure for your entire life.
00:15:57
Speaker
Something that is just going to grow in importance and value to you the longer you own it.
00:16:05
Speaker
And in that context, the precise dollar amount that you're paying for it
00:16:13
Speaker
is probably not going to matter that much in the long run.
00:16:16
Speaker
What's going to matter a whole lot more is that you've got something that's high quality, that resonates with your interests, with your aesthetic preferences, with your historical interests, with your passions, and something that speaks to you, something that captures your imagination.
00:16:36
Speaker
And, of course, something authentic.
00:16:38
Speaker
And there's always a trade-off between buying something from an auction house where it's the Wild West and who knows if it's real or fake or what versus potentially paying a lot more for something that you buy from a
00:16:52
Speaker
you know, a sophisticated dealer.
00:16:54
Speaker
And, you know, you can make that calculation for yourself, where you want to fall on that spectrum, how much security you want, how much risk you want.
00:17:01
Speaker
But don't let the top line number be the driving force behind the way that you're looking for antiques.
00:17:10
Speaker
Well, you've sold me, Ben, and I trust you, but there are some people who might try to sell you on fakes.
Connoisseurship and Trust in Antiques
00:17:16
Speaker
So the next question that a lot of novice and experienced collectors are thinking about and which Ashley has voiced is how do you spot a fake?
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's a huge question and like obviously a really important one.
00:17:33
Speaker
You know, it's wildly different from field to field, from category to category.
00:17:39
Speaker
And the sort of crass shorthand answer is connoisseurship.
00:17:44
Speaker
You know, look at thousands of pieces, read books, learn from people.
00:17:49
Speaker
see, you know, develop your own instinct.
00:17:53
Speaker
But, you know, that's obviously that that's the answer that's relevant for people who are specialists in the field, you know, who are planning to become really devoted collectors.
00:18:04
Speaker
The broader answer is you have to build a network of trust.
00:18:09
Speaker
You have to figure out who you can rely on.
00:18:12
Speaker
whether it's dealers, whether it's people in the auction business, whether it's an advisor, whether it's a friend, you know, somebody in the field.
00:18:22
Speaker
Who can you trust?
00:18:24
Speaker
Who can you rely on to give you the best information?
00:18:27
Speaker
The other thing to say about that is, and this maybe seems obvious, but I have seen so many people falling for it.
00:18:34
Speaker
It's not funny.
00:18:36
Speaker
If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
00:18:40
Speaker
Okay, I mean, not necessarily.
00:18:44
Speaker
There are diamonds in the rough.
00:18:45
Speaker
You see stories all the time, of course, of people buying something in a flea market for $50 and it turns out to be some incredible, you know, $100,000 object.
00:18:53
Speaker
I'm not saying that can't happen, but probably don't assume that that is what has just happened to you.
00:19:00
Speaker
If you see a dealer trying to sell something that you think should be worth a lot more than it is, you
00:19:08
Speaker
There's a chance that dealer has no idea what they're doing and that they're, you know, they're just willing to leave money on the table.
00:19:16
Speaker
But there's a much bigger chance that they know exactly what they're doing.
00:19:19
Speaker
They know more about it than you do.
00:19:21
Speaker
And you are not getting the sweetheart deal that you think you are.
00:19:25
Speaker
So Ben, your mom wants to know whether you've always done your homework or whether you've been duped by an object or the seller of an object.
00:19:36
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:19:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:38
Speaker
Thanks, mom.
00:19:39
Speaker
That's a really nice question.
00:19:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:41
Speaker
The answer is yes, I have.
00:19:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:46
Speaker
You know, it's something that we do in the business with some frequency is take a risk.
00:19:54
Speaker
You know, we'll buy something that we think, well, there's an 80% chance that this piece is authentic.
00:20:01
Speaker
Or there's a 50% chance that this piece is authentic.
00:20:04
Speaker
But at the price it's being sold at, we think it's worth taking the chance to buy it and then figure it out.
00:20:11
Speaker
And if we can figure it out and if it turns out to be what it's supposed to be or if it turns out to be as important as we think it is, then, you know, we'll make a healthy profit on it.
00:20:21
Speaker
And if it's not, then that's part of the cost of doing business.
00:20:25
Speaker
I don't want to necessarily get too specific about that.
00:20:29
Speaker
But I have seen a lot.
00:20:31
Speaker
I mean, in silver, there are so many instances of either outright fakes or pieces that I've had, you know, fancy engraving with made up stories and provenance added to try to enhance the value of the object.
Disagreements in Antique Valuation
00:20:46
Speaker
You know, I see that stuff on an almost weekly basis.
00:20:51
Speaker
Okay, switching gears here.
00:20:52
Speaker
Alexander asks, what happens when two experts disagree?
00:20:57
Speaker
Yeah, well, a lot of different things can happen depending on who the experts are and how congenial they happen to be.
00:21:08
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know.
00:21:09
Speaker
I mean, this happens actually with surprising frequency.
00:21:13
Speaker
And it's not just about whether a piece is authentic or not.
00:21:16
Speaker
You know, those questions can often be resolved.
00:21:20
Speaker
Or even if they can't be totally resolved, you can at least say, well, you know, on balance, it seems like there are questions about this piece that are difficult to answer.
00:21:33
Speaker
You know, that's a matter that can be addressed in the court of public opinion where, you know, everybody can present their view, their evidence, and people can kind of reach their own conclusions.
00:21:45
Speaker
A different kind of disagreement is when experts disagree about what something is worth.
00:21:52
Speaker
And that is actually in a way that can be a lot more interesting because, and I have this experience all the time just at TrubSoul with my colleagues where we'll get something in or we'll be looking at something considering whether to buy it.
00:22:07
Speaker
And, you know, someone poses that one of us will pose the question, what is this worth?
00:22:12
Speaker
What can we sell this for?
00:22:14
Speaker
You know, what is a retail price that we can mark this and what should we be willing to pay for it?
00:22:20
Speaker
And, you know, sometimes we'll all come up with pretty similar answers within 10 or 20 percent of each other, especially if it's a fairly established category of object, if it's something that we've seen similar examples go through the auction houses recently or through our shop or through someone else's shop.
00:22:42
Speaker
But oftentimes there are pieces that are just totally singular and unique and that you don't have much of a basis for comparison.
00:22:51
Speaker
And we might come up with numbers that are off by a factor of 50 or 100%.
00:22:58
Speaker
And, you know, Tim Martin, the owner of the shop, his stepfather was Eric Shrubsell, who ran that firm for decades.
00:23:06
Speaker
And Tim says that what Eric always told him when they were having this kind of conversation about price was he said, well, Timmy, if you don't know what it's worth and I don't know what it's worth, then who the hell does?
00:23:23
Speaker
And I think that's a great point.
00:23:24
Speaker
If you have a couple of top experts, people who are really experienced in this field and they disagree wildly on what something is worth, you can't just say one of them is wrong and the other is right.
00:23:34
Speaker
You just have to acknowledge that there's so much uncertainty built into it.
00:23:38
Speaker
What something is worth is what somebody is willing to pay for it.
00:23:42
Speaker
And how do you predict that?
00:23:45
Speaker
I don't know.
00:23:45
Speaker
It doesn't really seem like a very interesting question to me, generally, what something's worth.
00:23:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I hear that.
00:23:53
Speaker
And I think a lot of people do have this feeling when you start talking about the value of art that it's sort of crass and degrading.
00:24:03
Speaker
I don't think that.
00:24:04
Speaker
I mean, and it's not that I'm like some kind of, you know, investment obsessed, like crypto bro.
00:24:12
Speaker
It's just that, you know, the value of a work of art, in other words, what somebody is willing to pay for a work of art, that is kind of the best proxy that we have for art.
00:24:25
Speaker
how much people care about this thing.
00:24:29
Speaker
It's, you know, like there are other ways to measure cultural influence and so on.
00:24:33
Speaker
But, you know, at the end of the day, if you want to know how influential is this object, how desirable is this object or this artwork, that's about the best metric that we have available to us.
00:24:48
Speaker
Bearing in mind that it's imperfect, that it can be misleading in all kinds of different ways.
00:24:54
Speaker
Like, I don't know, that's still a really interesting bit of data for me.
Cultural Significance and Art Valuation
00:25:00
Speaker
And it's also, it's also interesting on a more personal level, you know, what is this worth to you?
00:25:05
Speaker
What would you be willing to pay for it?
00:25:07
Speaker
You know, or what would I be willing to pay for it?
00:25:09
Speaker
Like, that's sort of an interesting reflection as well.
00:25:12
Speaker
And, and a way of really holding your own feet to the fire.
00:25:15
Speaker
Like what, how much do I care about this thing?
00:25:19
Speaker
Right.
00:25:19
Speaker
My hang up when it comes to the valuation of artworks might have something to do with innumeracy on my part.
00:25:26
Speaker
You look at an incredible work of art, then you see the price tag and the relationship between the two doesn't compute.
00:25:34
Speaker
The price seems an almost vulgar simplification of the art, you know, like art taken down from the pedestal to be haggled over in the marketplace.
00:25:43
Speaker
Well, yeah.
00:25:43
Speaker
And I, you know, I definitely, I'm not interested in the kind of obsessive investment style interest in, you know, oh, well, the, you know, the market for Kandinsky's is really, really hot this year.
00:25:58
Speaker
So like art advisors, tell your clients to buy Kandinsky.
00:26:02
Speaker
You know, that kind of thing is really boring to me.
00:26:06
Speaker
It's, it's more of the
00:26:10
Speaker
You know, the emotional significance of the money to people who are not just investing, but who are really collecting.
00:26:19
Speaker
Sure.
00:26:20
Speaker
Okay, well, let's move on.
00:26:22
Speaker
So Levi asks what the best film is for antique lovers.
Disney Films and Antique Lovers
00:26:26
Speaker
You could just post somebody else's answer from a previous episode.
00:26:30
Speaker
Haven't you asked people that before?
00:26:32
Speaker
I have.
00:26:32
Speaker
I have.
00:26:33
Speaker
I've gotten some good answers.
00:26:34
Speaker
Actually, you know, it was not too long ago that we had Wolf Burchard on the program who had curated a whole exhibition about Walt Disney and the Deck of Arts in Walt Disney films.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:49
Speaker
I mean, you could do worse than, than Disney films, although I didn't watch them as a, as a child, so they don't really have that sentimental value for me.
00:26:56
Speaker
Interesting.
00:26:56
Speaker
Why not?
00:26:59
Speaker
Uh, I had the kinds of parents who were dragging me around to every art gallery in Italy and not necessarily to the movie theaters to, to watch the latest Disney animation.
00:27:11
Speaker
Okay.
Book Recommendations: The Arcanum
00:27:12
Speaker
In the same vein, what is the best book for antique lovers?
00:27:16
Speaker
And this is my question, by the way.
00:27:17
Speaker
I got to get my 15 seconds in here.
00:27:21
Speaker
Sure.
00:27:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
00:27:24
Speaker
I think you could take that in different ways.
00:27:27
Speaker
Like one of the best books that is actually about antiques in terms of just being a page turner and both informative but super fun is
00:27:37
Speaker
is the book by Janet Gleason called The Arcanum, which is really about the European pursuit of porcelain.
00:27:51
Speaker
you know, the great secret of the East, you know, how do you make this miraculous material and what's the science and the chemistry behind it and how do you make it commercial and industrial and so on.
00:28:05
Speaker
And that's a fantastic historical story, which also will just immerse you into the world of European decorative arts.
00:28:15
Speaker
in a really page journey kind of way.
00:28:18
Speaker
But to be honest, the best book for antiques lovers, I think is the Odyssey or the Iliad, you know, these Homeric classics in which the, the, the objects, the relics, the ornaments are so they're, they are the beating heart of the narrative.
00:28:40
Speaker
You know, in the Iliad, it's all about the weapons and the armor.
00:28:44
Speaker
I mean, there's, of course, there's the shield of Achilles, which is described in this magnificent, I mean, it's what, it's 200, 300 lines of poetry just describing the design and craft of this shield.
00:28:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:01
Speaker
And, you know, the totems, the religious icons and artifacts, you know, these objects that are living, breathing elements of the story from start to finish.
00:29:14
Speaker
I mean, it really, it makes you think about the Homeric world and the way in which the sort of polytheism and the notion of sort of spirited, a spirited world.
00:29:31
Speaker
really inflects the experience of art and decorative arts.
00:29:36
Speaker
I find that incredibly powerful and immersive from an antiques perspective.
Object Obsession in Literature
00:29:43
Speaker
I always like the convention of naming your sword or whatever weapon you have, imbuing it with these animistic characteristics.
00:29:53
Speaker
There's such richness and nothing lost in thinking of objects that you own as having personalities.
00:29:59
Speaker
I mean, they certainly have histories.
00:30:01
Speaker
And why shouldn't they have names often?
00:30:03
Speaker
I mean, it can get cutesy, of course, but it won't get cutesy for glamdring.
00:30:08
Speaker
For what?
00:30:09
Speaker
Gandalf's sword.
00:30:10
Speaker
Oh.
00:30:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:13
Speaker
And actually, I mean, that's an obvious great choice also is the Lord of the Rings or anything by Tolkien, which is just, you know, object obsessed and decorative arts obsessed.
00:30:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:28
Speaker
Well, let me tell you a little bit about the book I'm reading.
00:30:31
Speaker
Actually, I just finished it.
00:30:32
Speaker
So, I just finished Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.
00:30:36
Speaker
You know, every page has between one and five words I've never seen before.
00:30:43
Speaker
And many of them- And you're a literate guy.
00:30:46
Speaker
Well, they're usually having to do with material culture.
00:30:53
Speaker
So like parts of rifles, parts of cavalry uniforms, parts of wagon wheels.
00:31:01
Speaker
But it seems like in Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy has done something like thumb through like a 19th century dictionary and then incorporated the terms for objects that surrounded people who lived at that time into his book.
00:31:14
Speaker
which serves to resurrect the words is meaningfulness.
00:31:18
Speaker
That's really cool.
00:31:18
Speaker
I actually, um, I was thinking about this a lot when I did the episode with Glenn Adamson about leather, because there's so much etymology in English that is wrapped up in material culture and decorative arts.
00:31:35
Speaker
Um, and the, you know, Glenn gets into examples of that in his essay about leather for material intelligence.
00:31:42
Speaker
Um,
00:31:42
Speaker
But that's so true for silver as well.
00:31:45
Speaker
I mean, the word hallmark is maybe the classic example, which is a term that comes out of the world of silver, literally meaning a mark struck at the hall, the goldsmith's hall, and then becomes just this incredibly useful everyday term far outside of the context of decorative arts.
00:32:05
Speaker
Sure, sure.
00:32:07
Speaker
Unless you consider greeting cards decorative arts, which I, you know,
00:32:09
Speaker
I mean, some of them maybe rice it out.
00:32:11
Speaker
I guess they do some pop-up greeting cards.
00:32:14
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, language is in a lot of ways that we don't think about.
00:32:19
Speaker
It's metaphorically inflected through decorative arts and material culture.
00:32:27
Speaker
When you walk through an art museum, what happens?
00:32:29
Speaker
You see some interesting things.
00:32:31
Speaker
You see some not so interesting things.
00:32:33
Speaker
And if you're like us at all, you're probably a little bit sleepy.
00:32:36
Speaker
Well, grab a cafecito and listen up.
00:32:38
Speaker
It's Art Slice, a palatable serving of art history.
00:32:42
Speaker
We are both artists.
00:32:42
Speaker
So we look at art history through that perspective.
00:32:45
Speaker
We cover the artists you know and those that have been ignored for so many different reasons.
00:32:50
Speaker
We look at the context of the time, we compare it to today.
00:32:52
Speaker
We don't dumb anything down, but, and this is a big but, we like to have a good time, okay?
00:32:58
Speaker
Nos gusta to goof around, all right?
00:33:00
Speaker
We have hungry pantry mons that might startle you.
00:33:03
Speaker
It's a long story.
00:33:04
Speaker
We feed them our materials.
00:33:06
Speaker
Art is just a visual language that is open for anyone
Daily Treasures: Silver Teapot
00:33:09
Speaker
to interpret.
00:33:09
Speaker
So if this all sounds good to you, join us on Art Slice, a palatable serving of art history.
00:33:18
Speaker
David asks, where did you find your great silver teapot that was shown in the magazine Antiques?
00:33:23
Speaker
And this is a reference to a teapot in your collection, Ben, from the March-April issue of Object Lesson by Benjamin Davidson and Pippa Biddle from 2023.
00:33:35
Speaker
It's a silver teapot of about 1886 to 1902 by Howard Sterling Company of Providence, Rhode Island.
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's, you know, when people ask, like, what's a, what's an item that you love in your collection, this is often the piece that I reference, not because it's some fantastically valuable piece, but just because it's very personal for me.
00:33:59
Speaker
I bought it.
00:34:00
Speaker
I fell in love with it.
00:34:01
Speaker
I continue to fall in love with it.
00:34:03
Speaker
I, you know, I, I'm sick.
00:34:06
Speaker
Right now I've been drinking a lot of tea and I've been making it in this teapot and that's, it just brings me so much pleasure to,
00:34:12
Speaker
And I hope that everybody finds objects like that, that they can connect with and that can bring them so much satisfaction in their daily lives.
00:34:21
Speaker
Where did I find it?
00:34:22
Speaker
I bought it at a little auction house that many listeners are probably familiar with called Pook and Pook in Pennsylvania.
00:34:34
Speaker
When did making plans get this complicated?
00:34:38
Speaker
It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together.
00:34:43
Speaker
Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th,
00:34:50
Speaker
And never miss a meme or milestone.
00:34:52
Speaker
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00:34:54
Speaker
It's time for WhatsApp.
00:34:56
Speaker
Message privately with everyone.
00:34:57
Speaker
Learn more at whatsapp.com.
00:35:00
Speaker
You know, we've been talking a lot about how things are valued.
00:35:03
Speaker
Would you say that this was something that you had your eye on and you found it at a price you were expecting, or was it a surprise?
00:35:10
Speaker
It was a total surprise.
00:35:12
Speaker
I mean, I had never seen anything like it in terms of its design, and I still haven't.
00:35:17
Speaker
I found one example of a kettle with a sort of comparable design also by the same manufacturer.
00:35:23
Speaker
But aside from that, I've never seen another example of this style of this design, which makes it kind of special to me.
00:35:32
Speaker
It's not, again, it's not something that there are like collectors wanting to pay a huge amount of money to buy it.
00:35:37
Speaker
So it wasn't that kind of a discovery.
00:35:39
Speaker
It was more of a discovery of personal interest.
00:35:43
Speaker
And yeah, so I bid on it.
00:35:47
Speaker
I think it's worth a lot more than I paid for it.
00:35:49
Speaker
But again, that's very subjective.
00:35:51
Speaker
Like if I had to buy it again tomorrow for some reason, I would be willing to spend a lot more money than I had to to buy it when it came up for sale.
00:36:01
Speaker
Well, it's where you brew your elixirs of good health.
00:36:04
Speaker
So what's that worth?
00:36:07
Speaker
And if listeners want to hear more about this, we're going to keep moving in the interest of time.
00:36:12
Speaker
But the article is online.
00:36:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:14
Speaker
And we'll put pictures, of course, on the magazine.com slash podcast as always.
Unlimited Funds: Collecting Passion
00:36:22
Speaker
Okay, Ben, this is another question from David.
00:36:24
Speaker
What is the category of objects that you would collect if you had unlimited funds?
00:36:29
Speaker
Yeah, wow.
00:36:30
Speaker
I mean, if I had unlimited funds...
00:36:33
Speaker
Golly, I mean, think of the collection of old master paintings that you could put together if you truly had an unlimited budget.
00:36:44
Speaker
Or, you know, medieval tapestries or, you know, or Han Dynasty porcelain or...
00:36:54
Speaker
It's, you know, the possibilities are really overwhelming.
00:36:58
Speaker
But, you know, at the end of the day, what have I developed my personal passion for more than anything else?
00:37:04
Speaker
It's antique silver.
00:37:06
Speaker
So the sort of quotidian answer for me is, well, that, you know, that's what motivates me.
00:37:13
Speaker
Really, that's what gets me excited on a daily basis.
00:37:18
Speaker
I'm assuming, by the way, that this is not things that I'm going to be trying to resell and, you know, buy mansions using the proceeds.
00:37:25
Speaker
Because in that category, I'm definitely going with modern art.
00:37:29
Speaker
But it's what makes me smile when I look at it and handle it.
00:37:34
Speaker
So I'm going with old silver.
00:37:36
Speaker
Emily asks, what's an object that got away?
Auction Misses and Misidentifications
00:37:41
Speaker
So this happened fairly recently.
00:37:43
Speaker
There was a great sale of antique pewter, mostly American pewter, which is an area I have some casual interest in.
00:37:53
Speaker
And there was this fantastic early New York tankard was coming up.
00:37:56
Speaker
It was around 1700, 1710.
00:37:59
Speaker
It was this beautiful flat top style of New York tankard.
00:38:04
Speaker
And I've wanted one of these for a long time.
00:38:06
Speaker
This was a particularly attractive example with very sophisticated engraving, which made it extremely unusual.
00:38:13
Speaker
It came up with an auction estimate that I thought was far too low.
00:38:20
Speaker
But I was really nervous to bid on it because I hadn't seen it in person.
00:38:25
Speaker
And I wasn't totally sure that the engraving was original.
00:38:30
Speaker
I thought, you know, somebody might have added this engraving later to try to enhance the value and the appeal of the piece.
00:38:41
Speaker
And so in the end, I didn't bid on it at all.
00:38:46
Speaker
And instead, it was purchased against the reserve for what I consider to be almost nothing.
00:38:52
Speaker
Now, I took this as a sign that probably the engraving was not original and probably people had figured that out and decided not to bid on it.
00:39:01
Speaker
However, a few weeks later, I discovered that the person who had bought it
00:39:05
Speaker
is arguably the foremost dealer in early American pewter.
00:39:11
Speaker
And so I don't think he bought it by accident.
00:39:17
Speaker
So yeah, that one got away.
00:39:19
Speaker
I mean, of course, if I had been on it, chances are this, this dealer would have,
00:39:25
Speaker
outbid me and I would, all I would have gotten was the satisfaction of making him pay a lot more for it.
00:39:30
Speaker
So, um, who knows, maybe I'll buy it from him someday, but, uh, yeah, it did sting a little.
00:39:38
Speaker
How often do you go to auction and bid directly against other people?
00:39:44
Speaker
Oh, fairly regularly.
00:39:46
Speaker
I mean, not usually at huge dollar amounts.
00:39:50
Speaker
I mean, through the firm, of course, we're constantly bidding on things every week, if not every day.
00:39:56
Speaker
But in my personal life, you know, I see things that intrigue me and I try to buy them.
00:40:03
Speaker
I don't try to buy them for the sake of pushing up the price.
00:40:06
Speaker
That would just be sadistic.
00:40:09
Speaker
Ethan asks, what's an object that left you baffled, never knowing what it was for or why it was made?
00:40:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's super interesting.
00:40:19
Speaker
I mean, I see these kinds of things all the time, mostly online, you know, in auctions where I think, oh my gosh, like what is that?
00:40:28
Speaker
But my favorite example, this is actually a piece that, and this is cheating a little because I didn't know what it was, but the auction house, which is a fairly prestigious auction house in England, did not.
00:40:41
Speaker
And it was an object that looked a little bit like a mace, like the weapon.
00:40:47
Speaker
And in fact, that's how they cataloged it.
00:40:49
Speaker
It had a wooden handle and a silver top, which was sort of bulbous with a hexagonal shape made out of plates sticking out from the handle.
00:41:02
Speaker
But it really looked a lot like a mace, like something that you would club somebody over the head with.
00:41:08
Speaker
But these plates were quite decoratively pierced, so they had little holes throughout.
00:41:15
Speaker
And, you know, the overall size of the thing was not that large.
00:41:18
Speaker
I think it was 14 inches, 13, 14 inches long.
00:41:21
Speaker
So, you know, not large enough to serve as any kind of practical weapon.
00:41:26
Speaker
I guess the theory was that it was some kind of ceremonial mace.
00:41:30
Speaker
But all of that was wrong.
00:41:31
Speaker
In fact, it was what we call a mullinette, which is essentially a stirring rod for chocolate.
00:41:38
Speaker
Because back before the invention of emulsifiers, your hot chocolate had to be whipped up right before serving it.
00:41:47
Speaker
And because chocolate was a drink of luxury in the 17th and 18th centuries, you know, that meant it was being served in the most elite aristocratic households out of silver chocolate pots.
00:42:03
Speaker
And so the stirrer that you use to whip this up right before pouring it also in the most elegant houses was made out of silver.
00:42:14
Speaker
Now, these eventually became obsolete as the culture around chocolate changed and emulsifiers were introduced.
00:42:22
Speaker
And so the vast majority of these pieces were melted down.
00:42:25
Speaker
But a small handful of them survive, a small enough number that even a fairly prestigious auction house that comes across one, at least in this case, didn't know what it was.
00:42:38
Speaker
Yeah, I remember that story.
00:42:40
Speaker
I think Tim Martin also talked about it maybe on one of our tours of the Winter Show, probably then called the Winter Antique Show.
00:42:48
Speaker
And I wonder if you're familiar with the Latin American variant of...
00:42:56
Speaker
Molinets, the wooden ones with the detached rings.
00:43:00
Speaker
Yeah, I am.
00:43:02
Speaker
There are so many different versions.
00:43:03
Speaker
I mean, there are versions of it in India.
00:43:08
Speaker
So, yeah, it's really a global tool.
00:43:13
Speaker
Okay.
00:43:13
Speaker
Jeremy asks what the strangest object submitted for an episode was that you had to pass on.
00:43:20
Speaker
And I don't know why you might have had to pass on it.
00:43:27
Speaker
Um, yeah, you know, I have to say I am so, I'm so grateful for the curious objects community and all the suggestions that you've made because by and large, you know, they've been really thoughtful and helpful.
00:43:44
Speaker
We haven't always been able to, to do episodes about everything that's suggested, um,
00:43:49
Speaker
But it just makes me really proud of our community and the people who choose to spend their time listening to Curious Objects that they have such interesting and informed ideas, really creative thoughts about what we could dive into.
00:44:08
Speaker
So I'm sorry it's kind of a disappointing answer, but there's...
00:44:12
Speaker
Nobody has suggested an object that I thought was totally just like bizarro and like, why would I want to investigate this?
Best Antiquing Location: New York City
00:44:22
Speaker
Now, what I have had is plenty of, you know, PR reps saying, oh, like, will you do an episode about X, Y, or Z thing that's tied up in our corporate thing?
00:44:33
Speaker
And the answer to that is usually no.
00:44:37
Speaker
This question is from Laura.
00:44:39
Speaker
Can you tell me about a place, a city town that's great for antiquing and what makes it so great?
00:44:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:48
Speaker
Okay.
00:44:49
Speaker
So funnily enough, I think the real answer to this question, and thanks for asking that, Laura.
00:44:56
Speaker
That's a great question, which you probably have a better answer for than I do.
00:45:01
Speaker
But it's New York City.
00:45:03
Speaker
I mean, come on, cop out.
00:45:06
Speaker
It's not a cop out.
00:45:08
Speaker
Every great object in the world comes through one of the major trading cities, whether it be New York or London or Paris, Hong Kong.
00:45:19
Speaker
And of those, you know, I think it's very hard to compete with New York City in terms of the art and antiques that come through the auctions and the dealers in the city.
00:45:30
Speaker
It's unbelievable what you can see within the city limits of New York on any day of the year.
00:45:39
Speaker
It's, you know...
00:45:41
Speaker
Any category of collecting, any period, any region, it doesn't matter.
00:45:45
Speaker
It's all here all the time.
00:45:47
Speaker
And that's part of, that's a big part of why I live here.
00:45:51
Speaker
But, okay, if that seems like a cop-out, the other sort of cop-out-ish answer that I'll give is, it depends on what you're collecting.
00:45:59
Speaker
And I really, I have so much respect for people who have regional focus in their collecting.
00:46:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:06
Speaker
who feel a tie to a particular place.
00:46:09
Speaker
Um, you know, it's just down in new Orleans and people down there are obsessed with pieces that were made in that region, uh, or that have been in that region for a very long time.
00:46:21
Speaker
And I think that's incredibly cool.
00:46:23
Speaker
And so in that sense, like the best place for antiquing is the place that you care about.
00:46:29
Speaker
What's a dream location for object hunting that you haven't been to yet?
Desire to Explore Japanese Metalwork
00:46:34
Speaker
Um,
00:46:35
Speaker
Yeah, so that's easy for me.
00:46:37
Speaker
Japan.
00:46:38
Speaker
I've never been to Japan, and I'm obsessed with 19th century Japanese metalwork.
00:46:43
Speaker
So I'm desperate.
00:46:44
Speaker
And some of that, of course, has come across the ocean.
00:46:47
Speaker
So I've seen a certain amount of that material here and there.
00:46:50
Speaker
But for the most part, I've seen it in books and pictures.
00:46:54
Speaker
So yeah, I'm very eager to go over and do some exploration with my own eyes.
00:47:00
Speaker
Alexandra asks what your favorite art fair is.
00:47:04
Speaker
I love art fairs in general.
00:47:06
Speaker
And, you know, that goes from the flea market to Brimfield to, you know, Tafaf, everything in between.
00:47:15
Speaker
My favorite for sort of personal and sentimental reasons is The Winter Show.
00:47:21
Speaker
which is coming up in just a couple of weeks now.
00:47:24
Speaker
So I'm really looking forward to that.
00:47:26
Speaker
It's, you know,
Favorite Art Fair: The Winter Show
00:47:28
Speaker
there are a lot of special things about the Winter Show, and I have a lot of personal connections with the show and with the exhibitors who go there.
00:47:38
Speaker
But more than anything, it's a nonprofit benefit.
00:47:41
Speaker
It's
00:47:42
Speaker
you know, the proceeds of the winner's show all benefit the side house settlement, which is this organization that does incredibly strong, important community work.
00:47:51
Speaker
And I, it, you know, the show really, I think reflects that it reflects that value system.
00:47:59
Speaker
Um, it, when you compare that to most other sort of top
00:48:05
Speaker
blind art fairs that are run by corporations with a very strong profit motive.
00:48:11
Speaker
It's not that they can't produce a great show, but the winner's show just feels like it's community focused.
00:48:19
Speaker
It's oriented around doing good for everyone, for the dealers, for the collectors, but most of all for the nonprofit that benefits from it.
00:48:28
Speaker
Based on the objects that this person made, what craftsman do you imagine would be the most interesting to be around?
00:48:34
Speaker
So, yeah, I think there's a question you could take in different directions.
00:48:37
Speaker
My mind immediately goes to William Morris, you know, the great 19th century artist and craftsman.
00:48:44
Speaker
And he made fantastically imaginative, creative objects across all different media, all different categories.
00:48:53
Speaker
I know he was a really interesting person because he wrote a lot and a lot has been written about him.
00:48:59
Speaker
And so I...
00:49:02
Speaker
don't really need to speculate.
00:49:03
Speaker
And so I think the direction that I'd prefer to take the question is actually a crafts person that I don't know much about through any other mode other than their objects.
00:49:17
Speaker
And for that, I'm going to go with a silversmith named Henry D. Not a particularly famous silversmith,
00:49:24
Speaker
Not somebody that is really sought after by any collectors that I'm aware of.
00:49:29
Speaker
Victorian silversmith, his pieces are totally attainable, you know, at reasonable low price points.
00:49:38
Speaker
And sometimes they're totally conventional Victorian objects, but often they're really quirky, like they have funny faces on them or funny figures on them.
00:49:47
Speaker
that, you know, might be like a snuff box that has a sort of distorted, disfigured looking face on it.
00:49:56
Speaker
And I don't know why.
00:50:00
Speaker
It's just the sort of thing that you don't find anyone else in his period making, despite the fact that for the most part, Victorian silversmiths were pretty formulaic.
00:50:12
Speaker
You know, they had their styles that worked.
00:50:14
Speaker
They executed those pieces.
00:50:15
Speaker
They made their money and they went home.
00:50:18
Speaker
But then you have this one guy, Henry D, who's going out there and just making the quirkiest little collectible things.
00:50:24
Speaker
I'd love to know more about how that came to be.
00:50:28
Speaker
And frankly, I'd love to meet his clients.
00:50:30
Speaker
And, you know, I bet that they must have been some of the most interesting people in Victorian London.
00:50:36
Speaker
Well, I'm looking at some of the objects you made like this glass claret jug in the shape of a seal.
00:50:44
Speaker
This question is from Lily.
00:50:45
Speaker
If you could travel back in time to any time or place and take back a souvenir, where would you go?
00:50:53
Speaker
All right, so Lily, I have a treat for you because this is, of course, none other than Lillian Stoner, who is a Curious Objects guest and a classic scholar extraordinaire specialist in Greek and other Mediterranean antiquities.
00:51:14
Speaker
And the souvenir that I want to bring back is...
00:51:19
Speaker
the papyrus on which Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are written, which Alexander the Great studied under the tutelage of Aristotle.
00:51:30
Speaker
I don't know if these objects exist.
00:51:32
Speaker
I mean, almost certainly they don't.
00:51:34
Speaker
But I have to imagine if I could travel back to Alexander's Greece and bring these back to the present, we would have
00:51:45
Speaker
some of the greatest literary documents in history with marginalia written in them by both Alexander the Great and Aristotle.
00:51:54
Speaker
I mean, can you imagine?
00:51:56
Speaker
I actually have a second answer to this question, which is a gold ring made by St.
00:52:02
Speaker
Dunstan.
00:52:02
Speaker
Yes, St.
00:52:03
Speaker
Dunstan, who was the patron saint of gold and silversmiths, but was also a real historical
00:52:09
Speaker
And Dunstan made this ring, which was, which remained in the English Royal collection, I think up until the 13th or 14th century, and then disappears from the records.
00:52:24
Speaker
Now, probably it was lost or melted.
00:52:28
Speaker
But I like to think maybe there's a chance it was, you know, was mortared into the stonework in the Tower of London.
00:52:36
Speaker
And if we scoured it closely enough, we could find this ring and have a ring that belonged to the patron saint of gold and silversmiths.
00:52:45
Speaker
This question is from Michael.
00:52:47
Speaker
What's the one piece of silver you would save if a comet were headed straight for Earth?
00:52:53
Speaker
Well, the most important thing about this question is it seems to assume that I am also going to be saved from this comet.
00:53:01
Speaker
So I guess the answer to that is easy.
00:53:04
Speaker
I'm going to bring my precious little teapot.
00:53:07
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder how Michael saw you perhaps getting away from the comet.
00:53:14
Speaker
Well, yeah.
00:53:15
Speaker
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine that they're going to put me in the escape pod, right?
00:53:21
Speaker
Sure.
00:53:21
Speaker
Or maybe you know Elon from your dealings.
00:53:25
Speaker
Well, they're going to need an antiques podcaster.
00:53:29
Speaker
Mission specialist.
00:53:30
Speaker
All right.
00:53:31
Speaker
Emily asks, what is an under-collected category of items?
Undervalued Craftsmanship: Native American Baskets
00:53:37
Speaker
Yeah, I love this question.
00:53:38
Speaker
And there are so many answers to it.
00:53:40
Speaker
But the one that I'm going to go with is one I have been thinking about a lot lately is Native American woven baskets, which the more I learn about, particularly these river cane baskets, mostly from the 19th, early 20th centuries, is
00:53:58
Speaker
My God, the craftsmanship is incredible.
00:54:01
Speaker
The material knowledge required just to harvest the correct river cane and prepare it.
00:54:09
Speaker
The ingenuity involved in developing these very sophisticated patterns.
00:54:15
Speaker
The fastidiousness of the weaving itself, creating these, in some cases, really remarkable shapes.
00:54:22
Speaker
I mean, it's...
00:54:25
Speaker
It's insane to me that these baskets aren't considered at the same level and in the same sentence as other great early American decorative arts like cabinet making and textiles and silver.
00:54:40
Speaker
It's every bit as sophisticated and...
00:54:43
Speaker
Every bit is connoisseurial.
00:54:45
Speaker
And it is, you know, these pieces are collected, but they're not collected at nearly the rate or the level of enthusiasm and frankly, the price point that I think the, that their inherent nature, that I think their quality and quantity justifies.
00:55:07
Speaker
You mentioned River Cane.
00:55:08
Speaker
So are you thinking specifically of,
00:55:12
Speaker
baskets from your home region in the south and its fabled vanished cane breaks or were these in other parts of the country too?
00:55:25
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, that's what I'm thinking about.
00:55:26
Speaker
But of course, during the period from which Native American crafts actually survive, the Indian populations had largely been wiped out across the Northeast.
00:55:40
Speaker
So, you know, and those who survived were often wildly displaced, you know, into the Midwest or the South.
00:55:49
Speaker
So that's largely where these river cane baskets are coming from.
00:55:52
Speaker
And by the way, almost all of the native stretches, expanses of river cane have also been wiped out.
00:55:59
Speaker
So even finding the raw materials to do it has been very difficult for a very long time now.
00:56:06
Speaker
Here's another question from Emily.
00:56:07
Speaker
What is the most chilling discovery that you've made?
Chilling Discovery: German Silver Piece
00:56:11
Speaker
Actually, the real answer to that is something that I may tell in great detail on a Curious Objects episode.
00:56:19
Speaker
I haven't even told you about this, Sammy, and I can't reveal too many details now, but it involves a piece of silver which was made in Germany in the 1930s.
00:56:32
Speaker
And you can maybe start to infer some of the themes that that might touch on.
00:56:39
Speaker
You've got an SS Dagger.
00:56:42
Speaker
No, no, it's not that.
00:56:44
Speaker
It's not that.
00:56:47
Speaker
But yeah, you'll have to stay tuned to hear more about that.
00:56:51
Speaker
Emily asks, what is a niche thing you would really want to study but probably never will?
00:56:57
Speaker
There are probably 5,000 correct answers to this question.
00:57:02
Speaker
There are so many niches that I would love to dive into.
00:57:06
Speaker
And of course, each one would take a lifetime.
00:57:10
Speaker
So it's tough to pick one, but maybe I would go with Chinese porcelain, which is just such a large, such an expansive and sophisticated area of study and of collecting that my feeling is it's really hard to half-ass it.
00:57:28
Speaker
So, yeah, would I love to be an expert in that field?
00:57:31
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:57:32
Speaker
But am I ever going to have the time and exposure and ability to refine that connoisseurial area?
00:57:41
Speaker
No.
00:57:42
Speaker
Here's a question from Andrew.
00:57:44
Speaker
What is the best part of your job and what is the worst?
00:57:48
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, look, there are a lot of things I love about the job.
00:57:51
Speaker
I love the detective work, the discovery.
00:57:54
Speaker
I love the surprise, you know, coming across things I haven't seen before.
00:57:59
Speaker
But I just have to be kind of cheesy and say the best thing about it is the conversations, the relationships, the people I talk with who...
00:58:09
Speaker
who share my enthusiasm and who feed off of it and whose enthusiasm I feed off of.
00:58:15
Speaker
And, you know, we, we get to talking about something.
00:58:20
Speaker
It could be totally niche and arcane, or it could be something really, um,
00:58:24
Speaker
general and broad about the experience of looking at something, holding something, using something, bringing something into your life, the chase for something that you covet, the success or failure.
00:58:46
Speaker
The objects that we're working with, we always have to remember the reason these objects are meaningful, valuable is because of their relationship with humans.
Relationships Through Antiques
00:58:57
Speaker
And so it's a field that is all about people, all about people.
00:59:02
Speaker
And it's about old people.
00:59:04
Speaker
It's about dead people.
00:59:05
Speaker
It's about young people.
00:59:08
Speaker
And the chance to share that with other people around me now, that's super exciting.
00:59:17
Speaker
And that's, you know, that's a big reason behind why I do this podcast.
00:59:23
Speaker
All right.
00:59:23
Speaker
What's the worst?
00:59:25
Speaker
Yeah, look, I mean, the worst part about my job is probably the same as the worst part about everybody's job, and that's the bullshit.
00:59:32
Speaker
And, you know, sometimes you just have to wade through it.
00:59:37
Speaker
And that's the, you know, it's the deception.
00:59:40
Speaker
It's the, you know, raking you through the coals.
00:59:45
Speaker
It's the, you know, being a pain in the ass.
00:59:49
Speaker
It's the
00:59:52
Speaker
You know, trying to pull the wool over my eyes.
00:59:53
Speaker
You know, all of that gets tiring, but tell me a line of work where you don't run into that.
Witnessing Antique Creation
01:00:03
Speaker
Levi asks, if you had one superpower...
01:00:06
Speaker
antique-centric, what would it be?
01:00:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's a fun question.
01:00:11
Speaker
So, okay, if the object were just to make unlimited amounts of money, there are all kinds of superpowers you could pick for that.
01:00:17
Speaker
Like, honestly, just knowing if something is fake or not would be incredibly, potentially incredibly lucrative.
01:00:25
Speaker
Or, you know, oh, if I just knew who in the world would be willing to spend the most amount of money to buy this.
01:00:33
Speaker
But if we're going to step away from the let me print money approach and maybe take a more interesting approach to this question, I've got to say the superpower I would want would be to snap my fingers and witness the moment of creation of an antique.
01:00:52
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:53
Speaker
Just to be there in the workshop to see the choices that are being made, to see whose hands are actually on that object, because oftentimes we may think we know who the quote unquote maker is, but that workshop may have had so many people in it doing so many different things.
01:01:13
Speaker
You know, to see the conversation that the shopkeeper has with the customer to see what they're interested in, what's motivating them.
01:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, just to be a fly on the wall for that moment would be, well, I guess the downside is that I would never come back to the present.
01:01:32
Speaker
I would just be constantly hunting down these creation experiences.
01:01:39
Speaker
But yeah, I would adore that.
01:01:42
Speaker
I remember going through a Michelangelo exhibition at the Met and being disenchanted to learn that he purposely destroyed most of his preparatory drawings so that it looked like he was taking inspiration directly from God.
01:02:00
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:02
Speaker
Someone on Instagram asked about whether we would ever do an after hours or adult episode.
01:02:09
Speaker
What do you think about that, Ben?
01:02:12
Speaker
Yeah, I love that idea.
01:02:14
Speaker
Like I said, if I weren't sick right now, I would definitely be drinking whiskey.
01:02:18
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, there is a lot of raunchiness in the antiques in our world.
01:02:28
Speaker
And we've touched on that here and there.
01:02:31
Speaker
The question from Hampton is, is there anything you think people shouldn't collect?
Controversial Collections: Hitler Memorabilia
01:02:37
Speaker
There are some common categories of objects that people think about as being distasteful to collect.
01:02:43
Speaker
And the most obvious example of that is Hitler paraphernalia.
01:02:49
Speaker
And we talked about that recently with Ken Rendell on the podcast, who famously debunked the set of fake Hitler journals that somebody had forged in part for political purposes, it seemed, or at least with political opportunism in mind, sort of rehabilitating Hitler's image in certain ways.
01:03:13
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:17
Speaker
You know, I don't know anyone who collects Hitler paraphernalia, but what I can say is that I can imagine a lot of different reasons for doing so.
01:03:31
Speaker
And some of them are deeply troubling and deeply unsavory.
01:03:38
Speaker
Am I prepared to say as a blanket statement that nobody should collect Hitler memorabilia?
01:03:45
Speaker
Well, I don't know.
01:03:46
Speaker
I mean, there are important collections of Hitler memorabilia and Nazi memorabilia in Jewish museums around the world.
01:03:54
Speaker
They have an important part to play in a very difficult and troubling history.
01:04:02
Speaker
Is it inconceivable that an individual collector might be in a good position to acquire those things and help to tell part of that really difficult history?
01:04:12
Speaker
I think that's totally conceivable.
01:04:17
Speaker
Now, there are things that I think people are just dumb to collect, like, you know, Beanie Babies.
01:04:24
Speaker
There's like no craft value, as far as I can tell.
01:04:29
Speaker
Easy there.
01:04:33
Speaker
To make a slightly more sophisticated point about that, there are plenty of categories of antiques and art that I think are...
01:04:42
Speaker
you know, they've become commodities for some reason and people got really excited about them because they're familiar.
01:04:49
Speaker
Like, I don't know, Bertoia sculptures are, they're very expensive.
01:04:54
Speaker
And I think the more common they are, the more expensive they seem to become.
01:04:59
Speaker
because again, they are recognizable.
01:05:03
Speaker
You see one, you have that brand awareness kind of recognition.
01:05:06
Speaker
It's like McDonald's.
01:05:07
Speaker
You, you, you know what experience you're going to get when you go to McDonald's or when you open a can of Coke, it's like it, it, it, it's a polished image.
01:05:18
Speaker
It's a familiar experience.
01:05:22
Speaker
Um, so you could say the same thing about a lot of blue chip art.
01:05:27
Speaker
Uh, yeah, that's like not a moral statement about what I think people should or shouldn't collect.
01:05:32
Speaker
That's just more of an observation that I think maybe people are investing a lot of money in things that are not really challenging them or not really bringing them any kind of novelty or any, any kind of real deep interest.
01:05:48
Speaker
Um,
01:05:49
Speaker
But that just seemed to be a kind of like, you know, arbitrary tokens, like playing cards or something, trading cards.
01:05:58
Speaker
There's nothing more corrosive to the soul than bad art.
01:06:02
Speaker
Well, I don't know if I would say nothing.
01:06:05
Speaker
But yeah, it's...
01:06:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's a great essay called Mass Cult and Mid Cult by Dwight McDonald from the 1970s in which he talks about the, and he's complaining a lot about TV, which I think is maybe unfair.
01:06:21
Speaker
But the idea of art that has the trappings and like the symbolic language of high culture is,
01:06:32
Speaker
But which doesn't have any of the spiritual or psychological challenge that is supposed to come with high culture.
01:06:41
Speaker
And so it's very easy and rote and you can consume it without much expenditure of energy.
01:06:51
Speaker
And feel like you're sophisticated for doing so, but in fact, not be getting any aesthetic value out of it.
01:07:00
Speaker
I think there's a lot of blue chip art that falls into that category.
Connection with Antique Objects
01:07:05
Speaker
Stephanie is wondering whether you've heard stories about objects being haunted She got the idea from her kid who lives in Chicago and loves to go to the art Institute and look at the antique mirrors of Antique furniture and take selfies in them She says I imagine that it's
01:07:29
Speaker
a way to get close to whoever might have used the mirror before in the past, and I wonder what your thoughts are.
01:07:36
Speaker
Yeah, well, look, I mean, I said this on an episode, the episode we did about the Delancey Bowl, which is a story of a really incredible coincidence, one that really made me question some things.
01:07:55
Speaker
I'm not somebody to seek out supernatural explanations for material phenomena, but
01:08:04
Speaker
But I do recognize that the human subconscious and conscious is capable of things that we sometimes don't quite fully understand or that we can't quite fully process.
01:08:23
Speaker
I think that
01:08:26
Speaker
objects can often impress us with something that I can only describe as an aura, you know, a feeling of significance, a feeling of connection.
01:08:34
Speaker
Um, is that the same thing as being haunted?
01:08:40
Speaker
Uh, I don't know.
01:08:40
Speaker
I think I feel a connection often to people from the past when I handle an object that they also handled.
01:08:51
Speaker
When I look at something that was also in their presence, um,
01:08:55
Speaker
Do you ever find yourself starting to talk like them or dress like them?
01:09:00
Speaker
You know, you're handling an old piece of silver and suddenly it's tea time.
01:09:08
Speaker
Not yet, Sammy, but I'm still young.
01:09:11
Speaker
There's time.
01:09:12
Speaker
Well, you are still young, but you will not always be.
Beloved Burial Item: Silver Teapot
01:09:16
Speaker
And if the unthinkable happens and you perish, this is a question from my mother, what antique would you be buried with?
01:09:24
Speaker
Now, consider that this isn't just another what is your favorite antique question.
01:09:29
Speaker
This piece would have to be withdrawn from circulation to be buried with you, and then it would be rediscovered far in the future.
01:09:37
Speaker
Well, first of all, Sammy's mom, thanks for the question.
01:09:41
Speaker
I kind of like the idea that I can just choose a piece of art that I don't want anyone else to look at anymore.
01:09:48
Speaker
But you're linking your soul with it, essentially.
01:09:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:52
Speaker
Careful what you choose.
01:09:53
Speaker
That's some deep magic.
01:09:55
Speaker
I suppose I should pick something really impressive in gold to bribe the guard of the gates to the afterlife.
01:10:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:04
Speaker
I don't know.
01:10:05
Speaker
I don't know.
01:10:05
Speaker
I mean, I hate to come back to it one more time, but I don't really hate to because after all, it is such a precious object to me.
01:10:14
Speaker
It's probably going to be my little silver teapot.
01:10:18
Speaker
You know, an unassuming object.
01:10:20
Speaker
It's not something that anybody else in the world will greatly miss.
01:10:25
Speaker
It's not something that will mean anything to anybody else.
01:10:30
Speaker
It's not as though I am very sentimental about what happens to my body after I die.
01:10:37
Speaker
But if there's one moment when you should maybe consider the symbolic significance of the objects you surround yourself with, I suppose eternity is a good premise for thinking about that.
01:10:53
Speaker
Well, that's a good note to end it on.
01:10:55
Speaker
And I want to thank you, Ben, for allowing to be done to you what you have done to others.
01:11:01
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:02
Speaker
Well, boy, it's not as easy as it seems from the other side, is it?
01:11:06
Speaker
Well, Sammy, yeah, this has been a lot of fun.
01:11:09
Speaker
I am glad that listeners have finally gotten to hear your voice a little.
01:11:13
Speaker
I don't know if I'm glad yet, but I trust they'll be kind when they bring it up.
01:11:18
Speaker
Yeah, well, maybe we'll do this again next year.
01:11:21
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Today's episode was edited and produced by, of course, Sammy Zalotti with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
01:11:28
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Our digital media and editorial associate is Sierra Holt.
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And our music is by Trap Ribbit.
01:11:35
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I'm Ben Miller.
01:11:55
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Hola Miami, when's the last time you've been at Burlington?
01:11:58
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We've updated, organized and added fresh fashion.
01:12:01
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See for yourself Friday, November 14th to Sunday, November 16th at our Big Deal event.
01:12:06
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You can enter for a chance to win free Wawa gas for a year.
01:12:09
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Plus more surprises in your Burlington.
01:12:12
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Miami, that means so many ways and days to save.
01:12:14
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Burlington, deals, brands, wow.
01:12:17
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No purchase necessary.
01:12:18
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Visit bigdealevent.com for more details.