Antiques Journal: In My Opinion

A gesture by a ceramics dealer set me off on one of those rambling trains of thought that are typical of a recovering academic. When someone asked him how business was going, he turned his thumb and the corners of his mouth firmly downward. His sort of ceramics had enjoyed a fairly long boom in popularity, and thus in price. But no longer. I’m not going to identify it, because I don’t want to kick a market when it’s down. But I do want to draw some conclusions that might apply more broadly to the antiques market.

Nothing in his type of ceramics could be called a masterwork. The pieces were factory-made everyday ware for the middle classes. Their forms were well balanced, well proportioned and serviceable. Their decoration was colorful and hand-applied by working artisans. Altogether, it’s an attractive, collectable type of ceramics that fully deserves its popularity. Up to a point. But that point was passed when, at the height of the boom, its prices approached near masterwork levels. Now stop for a moment, and count the types of antiques and folk art where middle-class pieces have been fetching masterwork prices. Used up all your fingers yet?

Such prices are unrealistic – easy to say, but hard to define. An unrealistic price is one that is higher than the “reality” of an antique can justify, and we can judge that “reality” in many ways. We can start by looking at its conditions of production and original use. If it was produced by artisans whose talent was equaled by many others; if it was produced to serve a useful function for a large segment of the population; and if its decoration and form was designed to appeal to, and be affordable by, large numbers of people; then it is what I call an honest, middle-class antique – and none the worse for that. Middle-class antiques are the core of the antiques business and they furnish and decorate most of our homes. They are terrific, we’re totally justified in loving them, but they are not masterworks.

Middle-class antiques may require an educated eye, but they do not require an advanced level of connoisseurship: they were made to appeal widely and easily, and they still do. And so they should. It’s only when they start to command masterwork prices that things go awry.
I wish I knew how to figure out a realistic price for a middle-class antique. I toyed with the idea of working out how many hours of work would be needed to pay for it when it was new, and comparing that with the number of hours needed to buy it when it is an antique. It would have been wonderful if the two numbers had turned out to be the same, but they almost certainly wouldn’t – and who can guess which would have been the higher? It should be today’s because of the rarity value that it has now, but did not then. In its day, if demand increased, production could, too. Today, if demand increases, it can be met only when unrealistic prices make faking tempting and profitable. Now there! Perhaps, I’ve stumbled on a way to establish what a realistic price actually is – a price that is too low to make a convincing fake profitable.

The fake
If the quality of the original is at the artist-genius level, faking is extremely difficult and beyond the reach of most craftsmen. But when the artistry of the original is at the artisan level, more craftsmen can fake it, and, if prices are at the near masterwork level, more will find it profitable to do so. Fakability, in both craftsmanship and cost, is not a bad measure of a realistic price.

What could be more fakable than Damien Hirst’s dead shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde that sold for $12 million? And if it was a fake, how could you possibly tell? This is what is known as “conceptual art” (I could hardly force my fingers to hit the A, R, T keys.) The “concept” was all that Hirst contributed. His hand never touched his “artwork.” In “conceptual art” there is no moment when the brush or chisel gives a stroke of such perfection that it makes you shiver. There can be no such thing as a realistic price; any price is a stupid one. The price you pay for a urinal to put in your living room and enjoy as art (“Fountain,” Marcel Duchamp, 1917) is stupid to the extent that it exceeds the cost of a urinal in a plumbing shop. Ask yourself, which one is the fake?

I pause here for a moment to give thanks to London’s Sunday Telegraph which, on Feb. 17, 2008, made my point better than I could ever hope to. It reported that Damien Hirst has sold a number of well-stocked medicine cabinets. The record price was £9.6 million. Another brought $7.15 million in New York, and another, a more modest £350,000 in London (all at Christie’s).

The Telegraph recreated the third example. A craftsman built an exact replica in three hours using materials that cost £84.23. The drugs to stock it cost £290.98. Total cost £375.21 ($628.55). The craftsman does not appear to have charged for his time – perhaps he was laughing too hard. The Telegraph then posted the completed work of art on eBay, listing it as “Not Damien Hirst Medicine Cabinet.” After the five-day auction it sold for the opening bid of £1 ($1.67.) Whose was the realistic price: eBay’s or Christies’?

Whether the price of a medicine-cabinet-as-art is £9.6 million or £1, it is not a masterwork, not by any stretch of anyone’s imagination. For starters, it doesn’t need what every masterwork does, a connoisseur who can appreciate it. So, am I implying that Damien Hirst’s customers were something other than connoisseurs? You bet I am. Masterworks require the connoisseur’s eye; middle-class antiques and art require an educated eye; Hirst’s art requires….you fill in the blank.

The masterwork
Talking about masterwork prices, a “new” Leonardo da Vinci has recently been discovered and has been valued at $100 million. A decade ago, when the painting was thought to be by an unknown German artist, it sold in New York for $19,000 – which was generally considered realistic. So what does this say about the connoisseur’s eye? How could a painting be a work of art one year, and then, 10 years later, a masterwork?

The connoisseur’s eye is much, much more than the eye of the expert, even if it’s the most sensitive and experienced eye on the planet. Every individual connoisseur has been preceded by hundreds more, and it is this cumulative connoisseurship of centuries (let’s call it CCC) that counts. If this CCC says that Leonardo is the best of the best, then he is. Period. CCC is the eye of western civilization. So we take its judgments seriously.

So, a painting that happens to have been around for 400 years has now been proved to be by Leonardo – and this one literally has: Leonardo’s fingerprint was found in the paint and we know it is his because it matches another print on a painting that is indisputably by him. When forensic science and the connoisseur’s eye concur, then we’re really getting somewhere. In these circumstances, any price is a realistic price. Exactly the opposite of a urinal or a medicine cabinet, for which any price is a stupid price – because their status as art prevents them from being used, when at least they would be worth the current retail price. Something that a recession necessarily brings with it is a cold dose of reality. Hirst’s prices are tumbling, Leonardo’s are rising. That’s realistic.

Rebecca Smith used to own an art gallery in Manhattan. She specialized in “emerging art” that she sold to rich, financier collectors. “Buying the work of unknown young artists was especially appealing to Wall Streeters because…it offered the possibility of ‘discovering’ artists and making a fortune as their work shot up in value – not unlike the thrills of the stock market” (New York Times 10/18/09). Now, Rebecca has had to close her gallery because, “Rembrandt’s are still selling, while video installations and dead cows encased in beeswax are another matter.” (NYT)
I’m sorry for you, Rebecca…well, actually, I’m delighted.

Return to realism
Now, we’ve come a long way from a piece of pottery selling for $2,000 when a realistic price may be half that. There’s no sure-fire formula for establishing the realism of a price, though our gut feeling that a price is out of whack may be no bad guide. But at least we can ask ourselves about who produced it and for what market; we can ask if it would be profitable to fake; we can ask about the length of time that it has been appreciated by experts. And then, of course, we can test it against our sense of the absurd.

Paying a realistic price is important. Realistic prices will hold up over the long term; they are less subject to the vagaries of the market and the unpredictabilities of fashion. Only museums can afford to divorce art and antiques from their market value, because they hold their collections for ever. In the real world, however, each time an artwork or antique changes hands, whether by sale, gift or inheritance, its fair market value comes into play. The guy who paid $12 million for a work of art that meets none of the criteria set out above, and that, in fact, is “art” only because it was briefly fashionable to call it that, will never get his money back. The guy who pays $100 million for the “new” Leonardo will. And that’s the way it should be.