Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: And today's Curious Object is... well, it's me.
Speaker: Okay, is that wildly narcissistic or what?
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.
Speaker: But what the hell, it's the start of a new year.
Speaker: It was just my birthday.
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.
Speaker: And I promise I'm not just sucking up by saying that.
Speaker: I really wish often that there were more opportunity to bring listeners into the podcast conversation.
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.
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.
Speaker: But you might be wondering, okay, if Ben is the guest today, who's the host?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, that, of course, is my intrepid producer.
Speaker: You've heard his name in the credits at the end of every episode of Curious Objects since the very beginning.
Speaker: That is Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Sammy, is this the first time listeners are hearing your voice?
Speaker: I was just trying to remember if I appeared on the Your Curious Object episode from, I think, 2018, 2018, 2019.
Speaker: But if not, then yes.
Speaker: This is an epic moment then.
Speaker: Yeah, I like to think of myself as your most faithful listener, though I also probably offer more criticism than most.
Speaker: I really hope that no one has listened to the podcast more than you, because that would betray a degree of insanity.
Speaker: Right, and as many times, too.
Speaker: But, you know, you find new things every time you listen through.
Speaker: And I know some of the background stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor that...
Speaker: enrich my understanding of the objects in a way that some listeners don't even get to hear.
Speaker: So maybe some of those things we'll be revealing in this episode with these sort of behind-the-scenes questions.
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.
Speaker: Well, this is a public podcast, so I do have to be polite, I think.
Speaker: All right, fair enough.
Speaker: We'll be a little bit diplomatic, but this is going to be a sort of a no holds barred episode.
Speaker: And actually, so I'm stuck at home right now with COVID.
Speaker: But if I weren't sick, I would definitely be downing shots of whiskey right now.
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.
Speaker: Sounds great, Ben.
Speaker: Should I take over?
Speaker: Let's get to it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What are we waiting for?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Let me settle myself in the director's chair for once.
Speaker: I'm going to be doing my best impression of Johnny Carson or Letterman or who have you.
Speaker: So, we're going to start out with some background on you.
Speaker: You're Ben Miller, Director of Research at SJ Shrubsall, seller of Antiques Silver.
Speaker: You are yourself, beyond the confines of your job, a silver nut.
Speaker: I'll take that as a compliment.
Speaker: The listeners would really like to know a little bit more, such as whether
Speaker: Your line of work runs closer to that of Indiana Jones or that of a hawker on the street.
Speaker: If you do in fact own and sometimes wear George Washington's transcending all silver grill.
Speaker: And if you are indeed New York's most eligible bachelor, even if they're too shy to ask.
Speaker: So we will hopefully be answering almost all of the pressing questions about Benjamin Miller on this special episode of Curious Objects.
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.
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.
Speaker: And that's definitely true for me.
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.
Speaker: And my parents were in Italy and brought me with them for the year while my dad was doing his PhD research there.
Speaker: And they dragged me around to every damn museum in the whole country.
Speaker: Now, today, of course, that would be a dream come true.
Speaker: But as a five-year-old, I was miserable.
Speaker: You know, how dare you drag me through every gallery?
Speaker: I mean, paintings are the most boring things I'd ever seen in my life.
Speaker: I had enough of it.
Speaker: I was sick and tired of it.
Speaker: I was whining, moaning, complaining.
Speaker: We were in Florence.
Speaker: We were at the Uffizi.
Speaker: wandering through the galleries and I was dragging my feet.
Speaker: I was, I'm sure I was kicking and screaming.
Speaker: And then
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.
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.
Speaker: And I looked up at it and I muttered, she's so beautiful.
Speaker: And maybe I should have known right then that I was destined for a life of, you know, aesthetic obsession.
Speaker: But it actually took a while into my career before I actually made that shift.
Speaker: You know, I worked in politics for a while.
Speaker: I did some journalism.
Speaker: I dabbled in.
Speaker: Even in like, you know, management consulting, it was kind of all over the place.
Speaker: And it really was almost by complete accident that I stumbled my way into the antique silver business.
Speaker: I had never looked at a piece of silver before in my life.
Speaker: I think I've told maybe bits and pieces of this story on the podcast over the years.
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.
Speaker: And it turned out that he was an antiques dealer.
Speaker: We really hit it off.
Speaker: And somehow I talked him into hiring me.
Speaker: And what do you know, however many years later, I still work for him.
Speaker: Wow, a winding path.
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.
Speaker: But man, I can't believe that you complain about being dragged through all the museums of Europe.
Speaker: I mean, the epitome of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, and yet you're still not happy.
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.
Speaker: So they had no choice but to bring me along no matter how much moping I did about it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So you like to start out each episode with a series of rapid fire questions.
Speaker: And so we're going to likewise feed you some of your own medicine.
Speaker: Boy.
Speaker: I'm not even going to ask you if you're game.
Speaker: You just have to do it.
Speaker: So you agreed to this episode.
Speaker: I know I can dish it.
Speaker: We'll find out if I can take it.
Speaker: What's the oldest object you personally own?
Speaker: That's an ancient Roman coin, a silver coin from the reign of Septimius Severus, which is second century, third century AD.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah, pretty old.
Speaker: Did somebody try to pay for something at Shrub's Hall with that?
Speaker: I would have taken it.
Speaker: But no, it was a childhood gift from my dad.
Speaker: It's actually one of the first old things that I ever owned.
Speaker: Man, and I felt so special getting like silver dollars from my grandparents growing up.
Speaker: Well, you'd be surprised at how affordable a lot of these ancient Roman coins really are.
Speaker: They made an awful lot of them.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, maybe you'll give it to me one day then.
Speaker: Don't get too excited.
Speaker: What's the most valuable object or artwork that you've ever touched?
Speaker: So that's actually an object that I encountered thanks to the Curious Objects podcast.
Speaker: It's the Caravaggio painting of Judith beheading Hold the Furnace that was discovered a few years ago in an attic in France.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: And yeah, so I actually saw that painting and touched it.
Speaker: And that was pretty cool.
Speaker: Not just because it was so valuable, but really because it's an amazing, there's an amazing story behind it.
Speaker: And listeners, you should go listen to that in the Curious Objects archive.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Does the work appreciate or depreciate because it has one of your fingerprints on it?
Speaker: Oh, well, I think that's probably a good 10% of the value of the painting.
Speaker: Okay, you're now banned from your current field and you have to pick a new specialty.
Speaker: What would that be?
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.
Speaker: So I'm just going to run with that and say I would be a concert pianist.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I've heard some of your playing at your holiday get-togethers that you host in your apartment every year.
Speaker: And you keep the band together.
Speaker: Oh, after about a half a bottle of wine.
Speaker: Yeah, that's not necessarily me in my past.
Speaker: Anyway, I definitely am not talented enough to have a career as a concert pianist, but I would love to be.
Speaker: Well, who is?
Speaker: Okay, what is your favorite museum to visit?
Speaker: You know, I just have to give the most conventional possible answer to that question because it's the truth.
Speaker: It's the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Speaker: It's a block from Shrub Soul where I go to work.
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.
Speaker: But there's, it's a place I can go every day of my life and never get bored.
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.
Speaker: That's about the last place you want to be for a long time, though it is very lively.
Speaker: Yeah, plenty of curious people around there, maybe some curious objects.
Speaker: Okay, speaking of curious people, what artist or craftsperson, living or dead, would you invite to dinner?
Speaker: Well, you know, you could look at this from a couple of perspectives.
Speaker: One being, I want to know more about this artist or a craftsperson and what they achieved and how they did it.
Speaker: The other being, I just want like a bridge to an interesting moment in history.
Speaker: And maybe the person who can fulfill both of those interests for me is Paul Revere.
Speaker: The the the Patriot and the Midnight Rider, but also famously a silversmith.
Speaker: And he has the added benefit of having been an incredibly successful businessman, which to me suggests he was probably very charismatic.
Speaker: So I'm guessing he'd be excellent dinnertime conversation.
Speaker: A dip no sophist.
Speaker: OK, what's the first?
Speaker: A what now?
Speaker: A dip no sophist.
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: Someone who is very good at table talk.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I thought that being a sophist was a bad thing.
Speaker: Only to non-sophists.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, I won't ask whether I'm one or not.
Speaker: Well, this conversation I think will reveal that.
Speaker: But it won't remove any possible damage.
Speaker: I'll let you know at the end.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What was the last artwork or object that you saw that gave you shivers?
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: So, yeah, I went to see it there.
Speaker: I've seen it there a few times now.
Speaker: They reframed it.
Speaker: It looks beautiful.
Speaker: And it's finally arrived in what I assume is going to be its permanent home.
Speaker: It's a really incredible painting with a really unbelievable story behind it.
Speaker: And standing in its physical presence just had a powerful effect on me.
Speaker: And by the way, a little treat for listeners, we are going to be doing another episode about this painting.
Speaker: because a lot has actually happened since the three-part series that we did.
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?
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.
Speaker: And I'm going to start out with a question from Liz.
Speaker: What is a common mistake people make when shopping for their first antique?
Speaker: Far and away the most common mistake that people make when they're shopping for antiques is not to do it.
Speaker: You should all shop for antiques, even if you don't know anything about antiques.
Speaker: It's super fun.
Speaker: And that could mean, you know, thrifting.
Speaker: It could mean going to a flea market or a little, you know, antique shop in the Hudson Valley.
Speaker: Or it could mean, you know, finding an auction house and bidding on something and having the excitement of competition and
Speaker: Just, you know, just break the ice.
Speaker: Get into it.
Speaker: You might hate it, but I think there's a pretty good chance that you'll like it.
Speaker: You'll find it fun.
Speaker: You'll find it engaging.
Speaker: And you might discover some types of objects that you never would have thought to seek out.
Speaker: And that's pretty cool.
Speaker: But the mistake that I see people making, and this is not just people shopping for their first antique.
Speaker: This, you know, I see this among even sometimes really experienced, like, top collectors.
Speaker: is shopping for price.
Speaker: And, you know, I get it.
Speaker: We all have a budget and we all want to get the most bang for our buck.
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.
Speaker: You know, I do it too.
Speaker: But the fact of the matter is when you're looking for an antique,
Speaker: Ideally, you're looking for an object that you are going to keep and cherish and treasure for your entire life.
Speaker: Something that is just going to grow in importance and value to you the longer you own it.
Speaker: And in that context, the precise dollar amount that you're paying for it
Speaker: is probably not going to matter that much in the long run.
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.
Speaker: And, of course, something authentic.
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
Speaker: you know, a sophisticated dealer.
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.
Speaker: But don't let the top line number be the driving force behind the way that you're looking for antiques.
Speaker: Well, you've sold me, Ben, and I trust you, but there are some people who might try to sell you on fakes.
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?
Speaker: Yeah, well, that's a huge question and like obviously a really important one.
Speaker: You know, it's wildly different from field to field, from category to category.
Speaker: And the sort of crass shorthand answer is connoisseurship.
Speaker: You know, look at thousands of pieces, read books, learn from people.
Speaker: see, you know, develop your own instinct.
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.
Speaker: The broader answer is you have to build a network of trust.
Speaker: You have to figure out who you can rely on.
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.
Speaker: Who can you trust?
Speaker: Who can you rely on to give you the best information?
Speaker: The other thing to say about that is, and this maybe seems obvious, but I have seen so many people falling for it.
Speaker: It's not funny.
Speaker: If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Speaker: Okay, I mean, not necessarily.
Speaker: There are diamonds in the rough.
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.
Speaker: I'm not saying that can't happen, but probably don't assume that that is what has just happened to you.
Speaker: If you see a dealer trying to sell something that you think should be worth a lot more than it is, you
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.
Speaker: But there's a much bigger chance that they know exactly what they're doing.
Speaker: They know more about it than you do.
Speaker: And you are not getting the sweetheart deal that you think you are.
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.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thanks, mom.
Speaker: That's a really nice question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The answer is yes, I have.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, it's something that we do in the business with some frequency is take a risk.
Speaker: You know, we'll buy something that we think, well, there's an 80% chance that this piece is authentic.
Speaker: Or there's a 50% chance that this piece is authentic.
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.
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.
Speaker: And if it's not, then that's part of the cost of doing business.
Speaker: I don't want to necessarily get too specific about that.
Speaker: But I have seen a lot.
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.
Speaker: You know, I see that stuff on an almost weekly basis.
Speaker: Okay, switching gears here.
Speaker: Alexander asks, what happens when two experts disagree?
Speaker: Yeah, well, a lot of different things can happen depending on who the experts are and how congenial they happen to be.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, this happens actually with surprising frequency.
Speaker: And it's not just about whether a piece is authentic or not.
Speaker: You know, those questions can often be resolved.
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.
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.
Speaker: A different kind of disagreement is when experts disagree about what something is worth.
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.
Speaker: And, you know, someone poses that one of us will pose the question, what is this worth?
Speaker: What can we sell this for?
Speaker: You know, what is a retail price that we can mark this and what should we be willing to pay for it?
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.
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.
Speaker: And we might come up with numbers that are off by a factor of 50 or 100%.
Speaker: And, you know, Tim Martin, the owner of the shop, his stepfather was Eric Shrubsell, who ran that firm for decades.
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?
Speaker: And I think that's a great point.
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.
Speaker: You just have to acknowledge that there's so much uncertainty built into it.
Speaker: What something is worth is what somebody is willing to pay for it.
Speaker: And how do you predict that?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It doesn't really seem like a very interesting question to me, generally, what something's worth.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I hear that.
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.
Speaker: I don't think that.
Speaker: I mean, and it's not that I'm like some kind of, you know, investment obsessed, like crypto bro.
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.
Speaker: how much people care about this thing.
Speaker: It's, you know, like there are other ways to measure cultural influence and so on.
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.
Speaker: Bearing in mind that it's imperfect, that it can be misleading in all kinds of different ways.
Speaker: Like, I don't know, that's still a really interesting bit of data for me.
Speaker: And it's also, it's also interesting on a more personal level, you know, what is this worth to you?
Speaker: What would you be willing to pay for it?
Speaker: You know, or what would I be willing to pay for it?
Speaker: Like, that's sort of an interesting reflection as well.
Speaker: And, and a way of really holding your own feet to the fire.
Speaker: Like what, how much do I care about this thing?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: My hang up when it comes to the valuation of artworks might have something to do with innumeracy on my part.
Speaker: You look at an incredible work of art, then you see the price tag and the relationship between the two doesn't compute.
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.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
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.
Speaker: So like art advisors, tell your clients to buy Kandinsky.
Speaker: You know, that kind of thing is really boring to me.
Speaker: It's, it's more of the
Speaker: You know, the emotional significance of the money to people who are not just investing, but who are really collecting.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Okay, well, let's move on.
Speaker: So Levi asks what the best film is for antique lovers.
Speaker: You could just post somebody else's answer from a previous episode.
Speaker: Haven't you asked people that before?
Speaker: I have.
Speaker: I have.
Speaker: I've gotten some good answers.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Why not?
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.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: In the same vein, what is the best book for antique lovers?
Speaker: And this is my question, by the way.
Speaker: I got to get my 15 seconds in here.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah, that's an interesting question.
Speaker: I think you could take that in different ways.
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
Speaker: is the book by Janet Gleason called The Arcanum, which is really about the European pursuit of porcelain.
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.
Speaker: And that's a fantastic historical story, which also will just immerse you into the world of European decorative arts.
Speaker: in a really page journey kind of way.
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.
Speaker: You know, in the Iliad, it's all about the weapons and the armor.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
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.
Speaker: really inflects the experience of art and decorative arts.
Speaker: I find that incredibly powerful and immersive from an antiques perspective.
Speaker: I always like the convention of naming your sword or whatever weapon you have, imbuing it with these animistic characteristics.
Speaker: There's such richness and nothing lost in thinking of objects that you own as having personalities.
Speaker: I mean, they certainly have histories.
Speaker: And why shouldn't they have names often?
Speaker: I mean, it can get cutesy, of course, but it won't get cutesy for glamdring.
Speaker: For what?
Speaker: Gandalf's sword.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, let me tell you a little bit about the book I'm reading.
Speaker: Actually, I just finished it.
Speaker: So, I just finished Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.
Speaker: You know, every page has between one and five words I've never seen before.
Speaker: And many of them- And you're a literate guy.
Speaker: Well, they're usually having to do with material culture.
Speaker: So like parts of rifles, parts of cavalry uniforms, parts of wagon wheels.
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.
Speaker: which serves to resurrect the words is meaningfulness.
Speaker: That's really cool.
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.
Speaker: Um, and the, you know, Glenn gets into examples of that in his essay about leather for material intelligence.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But that's so true for silver as well.
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.
Speaker: Sure, sure.
Speaker: Unless you consider greeting cards decorative arts, which I, you know,
Speaker: I mean, some of them maybe rice it out.
Speaker: I guess they do some pop-up greeting cards.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, language is in a lot of ways that we don't think about.
Speaker: It's metaphorically inflected through decorative arts and material culture.
Speaker: When you walk through an art museum, what happens?
Speaker: You see some interesting things.
Speaker: You see some not so interesting things.
Speaker: And if you're like us at all, you're probably a little bit sleepy.
Speaker: Well, grab a cafecito and listen up.
Speaker: It's Art Slice, a palatable serving of art history.
Speaker: We are both artists.
Speaker: So we look at art history through that perspective.
Speaker: We cover the artists you know and those that have been ignored for so many different reasons.
Speaker: We look at the context of the time, we compare it to today.
Speaker: We don't dumb anything down, but, and this is a big but, we like to have a good time, okay?
Speaker: Nos gusta to goof around, all right?
Speaker: We have hungry pantry mons that might startle you.
Speaker: It's a long story.
Speaker: We feed them our materials.
Speaker: Art is just a visual language that is open for anyone to interpret.
Speaker: So if this all sounds good to you, join us on Art Slice, a palatable serving of art history.
Speaker: David asks, where did you find your great silver teapot that was shown in the magazine Antiques?
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.
Speaker: It's a silver teapot of about 1886 to 1902 by Howard Sterling Company of Providence, Rhode Island.
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.
Speaker: I bought it.
Speaker: I fell in love with it.
Speaker: I continue to fall in love with it.
Speaker: I, you know, I, I'm sick.
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,
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.
Speaker: Where did I find it?
Speaker: I bought it at a little auction house that many listeners are probably familiar with called Pook and Pook in Pennsylvania.
Speaker: When did making plans get this complicated?
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Speaker: You know, we've been talking a lot about how things are valued.
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?
Speaker: It was a total surprise.
Speaker: I mean, I had never seen anything like it in terms of its design, and I still haven't.
Speaker: I found one example of a kettle with a sort of comparable design also by the same manufacturer.
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.
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.
Speaker: So it wasn't that kind of a discovery.
Speaker: It was more of a discovery of personal interest.
Speaker: And yeah, so I bid on it.
Speaker: I think it's worth a lot more than I paid for it.
Speaker: But again, that's very subjective.
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.
Speaker: Well, it's where you brew your elixirs of good health.
Speaker: So what's that worth?
Speaker: And if listeners want to hear more about this, we're going to keep moving in the interest of time.
Speaker: But the article is online.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we'll put pictures, of course, on the magazine.com slash podcast as always.
Speaker: Okay, Ben, this is another question from David.
Speaker: What is the category of objects that you would collect if you had unlimited funds?
Speaker: Yeah, wow.
Speaker: I mean, if I had unlimited funds...
Speaker: Golly, I mean, think of the collection of old master paintings that you could put together if you truly had an unlimited budget.
Speaker: Or, you know, medieval tapestries or, you know, or Han Dynasty porcelain or...
Speaker: It's, you know, the possibilities are really overwhelming.
Speaker: But, you know, at the end of the day, what have I developed my personal passion for more than anything else?
Speaker: It's antique silver.
Speaker: So the sort of quotidian answer for me is, well, that, you know, that's what motivates me.
Speaker: Really, that's what gets me excited on a daily basis.
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.
Speaker: Because in that category, I'm definitely going with modern art.
Speaker: But it's what makes me smile when I look at it and handle it.
Speaker: So I'm going with old silver.
Speaker: Emily asks, what's an object that got away?
Speaker: So this happened fairly recently.
Speaker: There was a great sale of antique pewter, mostly American pewter, which is an area I have some casual interest in.
Speaker: And there was this fantastic early New York tankard was coming up.
Speaker: It was around 1700, 1710.
Speaker: It was this beautiful flat top style of New York tankard.
Speaker: And I've wanted one of these for a long time.
Speaker: This was a particularly attractive example with very sophisticated engraving, which made it extremely unusual.
Speaker: It came up with an auction estimate that I thought was far too low.
Speaker: But I was really nervous to bid on it because I hadn't seen it in person.
Speaker: And I wasn't totally sure that the engraving was original.
Speaker: I thought, you know, somebody might have added this engraving later to try to enhance the value and the appeal of the piece.
Speaker: And so in the end, I didn't bid on it at all.
Speaker: And instead, it was purchased against the reserve for what I consider to be almost nothing.
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.
Speaker: However, a few weeks later, I discovered that the person who had bought it
Speaker: is arguably the foremost dealer in early American pewter.
Speaker: And so I don't think he bought it by accident.
Speaker: So yeah, that one got away.
Speaker: I mean, of course, if I had been on it, chances are this, this dealer would have,
Speaker: outbid me and I would, all I would have gotten was the satisfaction of making him pay a lot more for it.
Speaker: So, um, who knows, maybe I'll buy it from him someday, but, uh, yeah, it did sting a little.
Speaker: How often do you go to auction and bid directly against other people?
Speaker: Oh, fairly regularly.
Speaker: I mean, not usually at huge dollar amounts.
Speaker: I mean, through the firm, of course, we're constantly bidding on things every week, if not every day.
Speaker: But in my personal life, you know, I see things that intrigue me and I try to buy them.
Speaker: I don't try to buy them for the sake of pushing up the price.
Speaker: That would just be sadistic.
Speaker: Ethan asks, what's an object that left you baffled, never knowing what it was for or why it was made?
Speaker: Yeah, that's super interesting.
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?
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.
Speaker: And it was an object that looked a little bit like a mace, like the weapon.
Speaker: And in fact, that's how they cataloged it.
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.
Speaker: But it really looked a lot like a mace, like something that you would club somebody over the head with.
Speaker: But these plates were quite decoratively pierced, so they had little holes throughout.
Speaker: And, you know, the overall size of the thing was not that large.
Speaker: I think it was 14 inches, 13, 14 inches long.
Speaker: So, you know, not large enough to serve as any kind of practical weapon.
Speaker: I guess the theory was that it was some kind of ceremonial mace.
Speaker: But all of that was wrong.
Speaker: In fact, it was what we call a mullinette, which is essentially a stirring rod for chocolate.
Speaker: Because back before the invention of emulsifiers, your hot chocolate had to be whipped up right before serving it.
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.
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.
Speaker: Now, these eventually became obsolete as the culture around chocolate changed and emulsifiers were introduced.
Speaker: And so the vast majority of these pieces were melted down.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, I remember that story.
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.
Speaker: And I wonder if you're familiar with the Latin American variant of...
Speaker: Molinets, the wooden ones with the detached rings.
Speaker: Yeah, I am.
Speaker: There are so many different versions.
Speaker: I mean, there are versions of it in India.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's really a global tool.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Jeremy asks what the strangest object submitted for an episode was that you had to pass on.
Speaker: And I don't know why you might have had to pass on it.
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.
Speaker: We haven't always been able to, to do episodes about everything that's suggested, um,
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.
Speaker: So I'm sorry it's kind of a disappointing answer, but there's...
Speaker: Nobody has suggested an object that I thought was totally just like bizarro and like, why would I want to investigate this?
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?
Speaker: And the answer to that is usually no.
Speaker: This question is from Laura.
Speaker: Can you tell me about a place, a city town that's great for antiquing and what makes it so great?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So funnily enough, I think the real answer to this question, and thanks for asking that, Laura.
Speaker: That's a great question, which you probably have a better answer for than I do.
Speaker: But it's New York City.
Speaker: I mean, come on, cop out.
Speaker: It's not a cop out.
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.
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.
Speaker: It's unbelievable what you can see within the city limits of New York on any day of the year.
Speaker: It's, you know...
Speaker: Any category of collecting, any period, any region, it doesn't matter.
Speaker: It's all here all the time.
Speaker: And that's part of, that's a big part of why I live here.
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.
Speaker: And I really, I have so much respect for people who have regional focus in their collecting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: who feel a tie to a particular place.
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.
Speaker: And I think that's incredibly cool.
Speaker: And so in that sense, like the best place for antiquing is the place that you care about.
Speaker: What's a dream location for object hunting that you haven't been to yet?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah, so that's easy for me.
Speaker: Japan.
Speaker: I've never been to Japan, and I'm obsessed with 19th century Japanese metalwork.
Speaker: So I'm desperate.
Speaker: And some of that, of course, has come across the ocean.
Speaker: So I've seen a certain amount of that material here and there.
Speaker: But for the most part, I've seen it in books and pictures.
Speaker: So yeah, I'm very eager to go over and do some exploration with my own eyes.
Speaker: Alexandra asks what your favorite art fair is.
Speaker: I love art fairs in general.
Speaker: And, you know, that goes from the flea market to Brimfield to, you know, Tafaf, everything in between.
Speaker: My favorite for sort of personal and sentimental reasons is The Winter Show.
Speaker: which is coming up in just a couple of weeks now.
Speaker: So I'm really looking forward to that.
Speaker: It's, you know, 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.
Speaker: But more than anything, it's a nonprofit benefit.
Speaker: It's
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.
Speaker: And I, it, you know, the show really, I think reflects that it reflects that value system.
Speaker: Um, it, when you compare that to most other sort of top
Speaker: blind art fairs that are run by corporations with a very strong profit motive.
Speaker: It's not that they can't produce a great show, but the winner's show just feels like it's community focused.
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.
Speaker: Based on the objects that this person made, what craftsman do you imagine would be the most interesting to be around?
Speaker: So, yeah, I think there's a question you could take in different directions.
Speaker: My mind immediately goes to William Morris, you know, the great 19th century artist and craftsman.
Speaker: And he made fantastically imaginative, creative objects across all different media, all different categories.
Speaker: I know he was a really interesting person because he wrote a lot and a lot has been written about him.
Speaker: And so I...
Speaker: don't really need to speculate.
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.
Speaker: And for that, I'm going to go with a silversmith named Henry D. Not a particularly famous silversmith,
Speaker: Not somebody that is really sought after by any collectors that I'm aware of.
Speaker: Victorian silversmith, his pieces are totally attainable, you know, at reasonable low price points.
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.
Speaker: that, you know, might be like a snuff box that has a sort of distorted, disfigured looking face on it.
Speaker: And I don't know why.
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.
Speaker: You know, they had their styles that worked.
Speaker: They executed those pieces.
Speaker: They made their money and they went home.
Speaker: But then you have this one guy, Henry D, who's going out there and just making the quirkiest little collectible things.
Speaker: I'd love to know more about how that came to be.
Speaker: And frankly, I'd love to meet his clients.
Speaker: And, you know, I bet that they must have been some of the most interesting people in Victorian London.
Speaker: Well, I'm looking at some of the objects you made like this glass claret jug in the shape of a seal.
Speaker: This question is from Lily.
Speaker: If you could travel back in time to any time or place and take back a souvenir, where would you go?
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.
Speaker: And the souvenir that I want to bring back is...
Speaker: the papyrus on which Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are written, which Alexander the Great studied under the tutelage of Aristotle.
Speaker: I don't know if these objects exist.
Speaker: I mean, almost certainly they don't.
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
Speaker: some of the greatest literary documents in history with marginalia written in them by both Alexander the Great and Aristotle.
Speaker: I mean, can you imagine?
Speaker: I actually have a second answer to this question, which is a gold ring made by St.
Speaker: Dunstan.
Speaker: Yes, St.
Speaker: Dunstan, who was the patron saint of gold and silversmiths, but was also a real historical
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.
Speaker: Now, probably it was lost or melted.
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.
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.
Speaker: This question is from Michael.
Speaker: What's the one piece of silver you would save if a comet were headed straight for Earth?
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.
Speaker: So I guess the answer to that is easy.
Speaker: I'm going to bring my precious little teapot.
Speaker: Yeah, I wonder how Michael saw you perhaps getting away from the comet.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
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?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Or maybe you know Elon from your dealings.
Speaker: Well, they're going to need an antiques podcaster.
Speaker: Mission specialist.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Emily asks, what is an under-collected category of items?
Speaker: Yeah, I love this question.
Speaker: And there are so many answers to it.
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
Speaker: My God, the craftsmanship is incredible.
Speaker: The material knowledge required just to harvest the correct river cane and prepare it.
Speaker: The ingenuity involved in developing these very sophisticated patterns.
Speaker: The fastidiousness of the weaving itself, creating these, in some cases, really remarkable shapes.
Speaker: I mean, it's...
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.
Speaker: It's every bit as sophisticated and...
Speaker: Every bit is connoisseurial.
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.
Speaker: You mentioned River Cane.
Speaker: So are you thinking specifically of,
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?
Speaker: Yeah, no, I mean, that's what I'm thinking about.
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.
Speaker: So, you know, and those who survived were often wildly displaced, you know, into the Midwest or the South.
Speaker: So that's largely where these river cane baskets are coming from.
Speaker: And by the way, almost all of the native stretches, expanses of river cane have also been wiped out.
Speaker: So even finding the raw materials to do it has been very difficult for a very long time now.
Speaker: Here's another question from Emily.
Speaker: What is the most chilling discovery that you've made?
Speaker: Actually, the real answer to that is something that I may tell in great detail on a Curious Objects episode.
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.
Speaker: And you can maybe start to infer some of the themes that that might touch on.
Speaker: You've got an SS Dagger.
Speaker: No, no, it's not that.
Speaker: It's not that.
Speaker: But yeah, you'll have to stay tuned to hear more about that.
Speaker: Emily asks, what is a niche thing you would really want to study but probably never will?
Speaker: There are probably 5,000 correct answers to this question.
Speaker: There are so many niches that I would love to dive into.
Speaker: And of course, each one would take a lifetime.
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.
Speaker: So, yeah, would I love to be an expert in that field?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: But am I ever going to have the time and exposure and ability to refine that connoisseurial area?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Here's a question from Andrew.
Speaker: What is the best part of your job and what is the worst?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, look, there are a lot of things I love about the job.
Speaker: I love the detective work, the discovery.
Speaker: I love the surprise, you know, coming across things I haven't seen before.
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...
Speaker: who share my enthusiasm and who feed off of it and whose enthusiasm I feed off of.
Speaker: And, you know, we, we get to talking about something.
Speaker: It could be totally niche and arcane, or it could be something really, um,
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.
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.
Speaker: And so it's a field that is all about people, all about people.
Speaker: And it's about old people.
Speaker: It's about dead people.
Speaker: It's about young people.
Speaker: And the chance to share that with other people around me now, that's super exciting.
Speaker: And that's, you know, that's a big reason behind why I do this podcast.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: What's the worst?
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.
Speaker: And, you know, sometimes you just have to wade through it.
Speaker: And that's the, you know, it's the deception.
Speaker: It's the, you know, raking you through the coals.
Speaker: It's the, you know, being a pain in the ass.
Speaker: It's the
Speaker: You know, trying to pull the wool over my eyes.
Speaker: You know, all of that gets tiring, but tell me a line of work where you don't run into that.
Speaker: Levi asks, if you had one superpower...
Speaker: antique-centric, what would it be?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a fun question.
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.
Speaker: Like, honestly, just knowing if something is fake or not would be incredibly, potentially incredibly lucrative.
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.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: I would just be constantly hunting down these creation experiences.
Speaker: But yeah, I would adore that.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Someone on Instagram asked about whether we would ever do an after hours or adult episode.
Speaker: What do you think about that, Ben?
Speaker: Yeah, I love that idea.
Speaker: Like I said, if I weren't sick right now, I would definitely be drinking whiskey.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, there is a lot of raunchiness in the antiques in our world.
Speaker: And we've touched on that here and there.
Speaker: The question from Hampton is, is there anything you think people shouldn't collect?
Speaker: There are some common categories of objects that people think about as being distasteful to collect.
Speaker: And the most obvious example of that is Hitler paraphernalia.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: And some of them are deeply troubling and deeply unsavory.
Speaker: Am I prepared to say as a blanket statement that nobody should collect Hitler memorabilia?
Speaker: Well, I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, there are important collections of Hitler memorabilia and Nazi memorabilia in Jewish museums around the world.
Speaker: They have an important part to play in a very difficult and troubling history.
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?
Speaker: I think that's totally conceivable.
Speaker: Now, there are things that I think people are just dumb to collect, like, you know, Beanie Babies.
Speaker: There's like no craft value, as far as I can tell.
Speaker: Easy there.
Speaker: To make a slightly more sophisticated point about that, there are plenty of categories of antiques and art that I think are...
Speaker: you know, they've become commodities for some reason and people got really excited about them because they're familiar.
Speaker: Like, I don't know, Bertoia sculptures are, they're very expensive.
Speaker: And I think the more common they are, the more expensive they seem to become.
Speaker: because again, they are recognizable.
Speaker: You see one, you have that brand awareness kind of recognition.
Speaker: It's like McDonald's.
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.
Speaker: It's a familiar experience.
Speaker: Um, so you could say the same thing about a lot of blue chip art.
Speaker: Uh, yeah, that's like not a moral statement about what I think people should or shouldn't collect.
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.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But that just seemed to be a kind of like, you know, arbitrary tokens, like playing cards or something, trading cards.
Speaker: There's nothing more corrosive to the soul than bad art.
Speaker: Well, I don't know if I would say nothing.
Speaker: But yeah, it's...
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.
Speaker: But the idea of art that has the trappings and like the symbolic language of high culture is,
Speaker: But which doesn't have any of the spiritual or psychological challenge that is supposed to come with high culture.
Speaker: And so it's very easy and rote and you can consume it without much expenditure of energy.
Speaker: And feel like you're sophisticated for doing so, but in fact, not be getting any aesthetic value out of it.
Speaker: I think there's a lot of blue chip art that falls into that category.
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
Speaker: a way to get close to whoever might have used the mirror before in the past, and I wonder what your thoughts are.
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.
Speaker: I'm not somebody to seek out supernatural explanations for material phenomena, but
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.
Speaker: I think that
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.
Speaker: Um, is that the same thing as being haunted?
Speaker: Uh, I don't know.
Speaker: I think I feel a connection often to people from the past when I handle an object that they also handled.
Speaker: When I look at something that was also in their presence, um,
Speaker: Do you ever find yourself starting to talk like them or dress like them?
Speaker: You know, you're handling an old piece of silver and suddenly it's tea time.
Speaker: Not yet, Sammy, but I'm still young.
Speaker: There's time.
Speaker: Well, you are still young, but you will not always be.
Speaker: And if the unthinkable happens and you perish, this is a question from my mother, what antique would you be buried with?
Speaker: Now, consider that this isn't just another what is your favorite antique question.
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.
Speaker: Well, first of all, Sammy's mom, thanks for the question.
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.
Speaker: But you're linking your soul with it, essentially.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Careful what you choose.
Speaker: That's some deep magic.
Speaker: I suppose I should pick something really impressive in gold to bribe the guard of the gates to the afterlife.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know.
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.
Speaker: It's probably going to be my little silver teapot.
Speaker: You know, an unassuming object.
Speaker: It's not something that anybody else in the world will greatly miss.
Speaker: It's not something that will mean anything to anybody else.
Speaker: It's not as though I am very sentimental about what happens to my body after I die.
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.
Speaker: Well, that's a good note to end it on.
Speaker: And I want to thank you, Ben, for allowing to be done to you what you have done to others.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, boy, it's not as easy as it seems from the other side, is it?
Speaker: Well, Sammy, yeah, this has been a lot of fun.
Speaker: I am glad that listeners have finally gotten to hear your voice a little.
Speaker: I don't know if I'm glad yet, but I trust they'll be kind when they bring it up.
Speaker: Yeah, well, maybe we'll do this again next year.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by, of course, Sammy Zalotti with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Our digital media and editorial associate is Sierra Holt.
Speaker: And our music is by Trap Ribbit.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
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