On Monday, transiting through the fabled Silicon Valley just to the south, a young man passed us on the motorway in a new silver Porsche. One of my occasional Gestalt moments caused me to say to Keith ‘That’s what the tech types spend their money on.’ Not the deepest of insights, granted, but it’s nonetheless true, and not just for youthful tech millionaires. For anyone who’s out of school and begins to earn big money, the first purchases are expensive cars and expensive homes. That’s what we did, moderated, fortunately, by a little bit of background in collecting that eventually yielded the reasonable degree of connoisseurship that allowed us ultimately to enter the art and antiques trade.
That we had something of a leg up, with exposure in our early lives to art, antiques, and the world of collecting, we nevertheless were decades into our adult lives before the penny really dropped, and we stopped as merely acquisitors and moved toward discernment, a movement, I must say, that continues to this very day and will stretch, I hope, inexorably to the future.
The point of all this is, collecting and connoisseurship, while it can be achieved and fostered, the disposition for it must be arrived at on one’s own, at one’s own pace. The young collector who arrives at our doorstep or who we meet at a fair, by the very fact of his arrival implies he’s predisposed to collect. And, inevitably, the expensive car and expansive home have already been acquired. More often than not, the home with its interior frequently the expression of an interior designer, the young proto-collector finds vapid and seeks, ultimately, to build his own connoisseurship as a comfortable expression of something ineffable that resides within himself. That, of course, is what all of us do. Yes, the ultimate vision is within, but the ability to achieve that inner vision is helped, certainly in my case, by surrounding myself with beautiful objects with which I feel an almost ethereal connection.
All this I say to remind and abstract myself and our business from the focus on youth culture and the sad, pervasive, albeit specious, notion that period material might not be finding favor with the young and wealthy. Fortunately, we found early on as we began to integrate into our inventory 20th century pieces, it was the self same collectors who purchased our period material that were buying those darlings of contemporary design, mid century modern furniture. Moreover, we’ve found that, in our years in business, the age demographic amongst our buyer/collectors has stayed constant. It is not growing younger, but neither is it aging.
I suppose what I mean by this is, the so-called youth market in the art and antiques trade, is our equivalent of the mythical El Dorado. It exists, of course, but not in any way that can be quantified or captured. Marketing has changed, though, with the internet functioning as the virtual fair or gallery, and this, sadly, gives erroneous credence to the notion that it is the young that are out there buying. Bear this in mind, though- my 79 year old mother shops on the internet, and I’d venture to say she’s hardly exceptional.
In the trade, our primary job is to maintain our own connoisseurship and if reinvention is necessary, it should be to the extent that we make ourselves technologically accessible and responsive, and be gracious and welcoming when the younger collector seeks to engage us in developing their connoisseurship.