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I have nothing against auction houses--they play an enormously important role in the clearing of estates and in supplying the trade with goods. If heirs had to sell everything left to them piece by piece, it would become a full time job. Indeed, selling at auction is probably the most viable method of clearing out a high value estate. Garage sales, estate tag sales and other at home methods of selling can be life savers in terms of helping to clear out a house as well. One man's junk is another man's treasure after all. There is an emotional hurdle that people often have to clear to allow any and all selling to happen--I remember having a garage sale after the death of my surviving parent and it was difficult watching people getting excited about things that I had distinct memories of, but then that is the circle of life and the circle of objects. But it is auctions that are what are of interest to me--my career has spanned a multitude of changes in the auction world that I think are interesting.
I did not get involved in auctions in the UK in the early 1970's--a huge mistake as I would have learned a lot. When I returned to the U.S., my initial focus was on restoration so I did not attend many auctions until 1979 when I went to a sale at Sotheby Parke-Bernet. Before I knew It, I was attending sales in the city all the time. Christie's and Sotheby's, and a raft of other NYC auctioneers, helped engender an overwhelming supply of goods. The early 1980's was the first real free for all where the auction houses--all of them in the city and there were many--would sell an item and two months later, it would be in another auction uptown in a grander sale. But what was a grand sale? This is where the PR firms of both large houses (Sotheby's and Christie's) excelled. They would capture an estate from Oyster Bay, Long Island, Greenwich, Ct. or Bedminster, N.J. and tout it to the private people who would, in turn, see the dealers bidding and then outbid the dealers. The intimation was that anyone could buy at wholesale. But then something happened that was both an advantage and a disadvantage to both auction houses. Expertise, in one word.
Expertise is problematic in a number of ways. Aside from the fact that there is a subjective aspect to expertise, English furniture has traveled more and been more heavily abused and therefore restored than most American or even French furniture. This wouldn't matter except that the "purity" of a piece of English furniture could be questioned--some private buyers chose to buy American or French as it might be better value (investment, in other words). Value is, of course, what the final buyer will pay for something in whatever circumstance, auction or otherwise and Christie's and Sotheby's validated value with their expertise and with an underbidder. The rise of the market in the 80's and 90's, already competitive, really accelerated in the belief that there was always an out to anything you bought. Dealers, on the other hand, were in the position of raising prices in their galleries to stay competitive with auction houses as they were selling items for less than what they were selling for in auction! Of course, the dealer response to the auction expertise was to have vetted fairs where every item in a fair would be looked at by the greatest experts--the dealers, of course!
You can't see the tongue in my cheek, but it is there. Furniture interpretation is, as I have written about often and recently, is uneven no matter who looks at it. Some things are damned hard to explain or understand. Some things are, rarely, pristine. Fakes are few and far between and very hard to identify, particularly if they are painted or gilded. The list of conundrums is long and only gets more complicated when you realize that furniture made in the last half of the 19th century was made in an identical fashion to furniture made in the mid-18th century. (What separates the two more often than not is proportion--alas, a subjective point.) As you can see, applying expertise to the mashed potatoes of English furniture is very, very hard and yet the big auction houses were living and dying by their experts. It couldn't last and it didn't as the market got hyped beyond all common sense. The rage for English furniture subsided after 2008 in this country and a little later in Britain--at least in the price ranges that it had been achieving. Expertise just didn't matter as a multitutde of the private customers abandoned the bloated market resulting in a precipitous drop. Everyone was to blame, but the greatest offenders were the best promoters. You can guess who they were.
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