Author: Michael Chappell

All one’s life is a confluence of events, or should I more accurately say phenomena, that once several come together in a situation of synchronicity are then elevated to the status of ‘event’. Herewith several of today’s phenomena.

Firstly, of course, is our annual summer sale. For those few of my gentle readers who don’t know the why of this, let me begin by saying that, with our business started in July, 2002, the summer provides Keith McCullar and me the opportunity to annually review what’s sold, and what hasn’t, and then price the ‘what hasn’t’ to move out the door. This is wrenching a bit, as Keith and me, using our collecting passion as a springboard for the establishment of Chappell & McCullar, are really happy, from an aesthetic standpoint, to keep close at hand very nearly everything we’ve ever acquired. Not practical, to say nothing of the expense, and it as well inhibits us from doing something else- sourcing additional fine quality pieces. From our prior backgrounds in finance- me in banking, and Keith as a chartered accountant- our rule- not entirely immutable, but something we try to work within nonetheless- is to price whatever we have to sell within two years of acquisition. If unsold at that time, we discount it to move it to sell it at our summer sale. We are not inordinately disciplined people, but Keith and I have stayed pretty close to this rubric. Has this practice then served us well? Witness our survival in business, where so many others have bit the dust. Mallett, Kentshire, Partridge- all redoubtable names and all, in the last ten years, consigned to memory.

The second of today’s phenomena was communication with a TV production company regarding a fly on the wall program specifically about the retail trade in antiques. That this should have come our way says something about our survival, in that those formerly vaunted names, now gone, have allowed some of the rest of us to, as it were, waft to the surface. This sounds self-congratulatory and conceited, but I suppose in any business, as in so much of life, one key to success is the mere fact of survival. But as tough as things are in the trade, indeed in any retail endeavor there is nothing ‘mere’ about it. Ours is a business and it is that we treat it like a business that brought us to the attention of the TV production company.

The last phenomenon was the bit of wisdom I received via email from a local estate agent. That is to say, received from a gentleman born locally who has been our good friend for a number of years, and who is principal owner of one of the nation’s largest estate agencies. By way of staying in touch, he sends out several times a week little anecdotes and homilies, words to live by, and other uplifting bon mots. Though some might characterize these electronic missives as spam, received of a friend for whom I have a high regard makes me inclined to read what’s sent. Today’s was about getting on with it- a writer should write, a composer should compose, or as quoted of Samuel Johnson ‘Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.’ This is probably the most appropriate communication from our friend, who we know to be a man of action. Confident and successful, albeit with a mistake now and again, but as he quotes this time Benjamin Disraeli ‘Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.’

So, with these three phenomena we’ve syncretized the event that is our annual Summer Sale, as what is for us our best plan for continued success in the trade. Yes, mixed emotions of course as I will miss the pieces that will inevitably make their way into the sphere of someone else, but then, that’s true of everything we’ve ever sold- but know sales result in plenty of other opportunities. For my gentle readers, then, not an exhortation but an encouragement- browse our Summer Sale, tell us what you like, and we’ll have a real meeting of the minds and know that what you like is well liked by Keith and me.

It always surprises me that we’ve become old lags in the trade, as I suppose we have with our 20-year tenure. That of course the industry has been in flux and thinned out at the top has functioned to waft us, based not just our longevity but the fact of our survival, closer to the top. But with all of that, it seems that our experience has provided us not just with a welter of stories, but the ability to hive those stories into a variety of categories, and it is one of those categories I’ll relate now.

Amongst our many gallery visitors, we quickly learned there was a class we dubbed ‘touchers’. Initially, that a visitor was hell-bent on touching particularly furniture pieces with a flat surface was just an annoyance. The fact of bringing one’s fingertips across the surface of a table, say, means that I will upon the toucher’s departure have to bring out the dust cloth and buff out the inevitable fingerprints and smudges. While this sounds like the act of someone inordinately house-proud, I will remind my gentle reader that there is of course a commercial imperative- we do sell these pieces from time to time, and showroom condition supposes an absence of grubbiness.

In the fulness of time, though, the inconvenience wrought by the toucher was replaced by real irritation because it became apparent that touchers never, ever made a purchase. I suspect there may have been times, though these don’t stand out in my memory, that we have even told gallery visitors not to touch. If we expressed this in a vocal tone mezzo forte in a minor key, I do apologize.

And I really mean it because, after too many years it finally occurred to us that the touchers’ action was really complimentary to our stock, and by extension, to us. The tactile contact, we came to discover, was a way by which a person who for whatever reason couldn’t make a purchase could still achieve some kind of connection with a decorative item that spoke to them. ‘Resonance’ is the current term, and I think it is as good as any to describe an experience between either an animate or inanimate object that sparks some kind of positive interaction, and so it has been for touchers- something resonates with them. It might be something they will never own but they do wish to enhance their resonance by touching it.

For those of you with a critical bent, you’ll find all of this familiar. What I term ‘resonance’ Bernard Berenson had more precisely defined over 100 years ago as ‘tactile values’. For Berenson viewing a painting of the Florentine renaissance might stimulate an aesthetic experience analogous to the physical act of touching. While our own stock is a bit thin when it comes to paintings of the Florentine renaissance, the decorative items we offer do share some commonality in centuries of age, and centuries of contact with humanity. It has been my belief that this imbues all these items with a real spiritual energy. Manifested as ‘tactile values’, ‘resonance’, or just plain touching, this spiritual energy is felt by very, very many people. Bearing this in mind, touching becomes irresistible.  

It doesn’t happen too often, but from time to time we are asked from where we get the items we offer, and what we paid for them. Slightly intrusive, but reasonable, I suppose, in that what we sell is not inexpensive, and those who have the money to purchase are not in the main, shall we say, supine.

We prefer to source our material privately as there is cachet attached to items that are fresh to the market, something, say, that has been out of sight for perhaps centuries. This happens to us from time to time, with exciting results. Witness a late 17^th century lacquer cabinet on stand, lost from view in the last century, but acquired by us and determined to have a singular provenance- and sold by us to someone in the entertainment field of equal singularity.

We do, though, make the occasional purchase at auction. The major auction houses, despite their onerous commission charges, nevertheless seek to be a retail vendor of period and contemporary fine and decorative art and have done their level best to erode the established retail trade in art and antiques. I read not so long ago an interview with a gentleman I know from The Georgian Group, and an employee of Christie’s. Married to an aristocrat and spending most of his time in the family pile, in his interview he decried the depleting numbers of countryside dealers. His tears doubtless of the crocodile variety, as his efforts are working a treat to dispatch the trade from this mortal coil.

Nevertheless, auctions remain a source for very many dealers, and just at the moment, vaunted Bond Street dealer Richard Green is in the soup, sued by a buyer of two old master paintings claiming that the dealer should have disclosed the pictures were only recently purchased at auction. This is true- a Brueghel purchased in November, 2017, and a Ruysdael purchased at Sotheby’s in June, 2017, were then sold by Richard Green to complainant Gary Klesch at TEFAF Maastricht in March, 2018.

In this imbroglio I am firmly on the side of dealer Richard Green. How our stock is sourced, beyond the simple statement that it was sourced through legitimate channels, is nobody’s business. As I have written before, whatever we’ve acquired at auction was always at a price that justified the time we spent examining the piece beforehand to judge its quality and condition, attending the sale on the day, laying down our money for purchase, transporting it away, paying for its (inevitable) restoration to put it in saleable condition, and then and only then, offering it for sale. For us, since we started in business, we have divined two tiers within the trade- a wholesale price and a retail price, and be assured, there is for us and most of the dealers in the accredited trade, significant value added by the time a piece is offered for retail sale.

All that said, to stay in business our stock in trade must be priced to sell. In the case of Richard Green, The Antiques Trade Gazette quotes a gallery spokesman as saying ‘…there are very good comparables (to the paintings sold to Gary Klesch)…’ As well there must be. The fine art databases, as well as those of the major auction houses, are replete with detail, including the recent sale records of the two paintings purchased by Richard Green and resold to Mr Klesch. What’s more surprising, and makes Mr Klesch’s claim markedly less credible, is the vocation of his wife with whom he examined and purchased the paintings. Dr Anita Klesch is a research fellow in the department of the history of art at Birkbeck College, one of the constituent colleges of the University of London. As her CV on Birkbeck’s website indicates, her speciality is the effect of information technology on the history of art, and the uses of digital imagery in education. Hmmm…presumably the ‘digital imagery’ and ‘education’ referenced in her CV was not self-directed and therefore did not extend to her own purchases.

We do ourselves have recalcitrant, although not litigious, clients. Though rarely and not recently we have been chided by an erstwhile client or two about matters associated with their purchase that while niggling and specious basically boiled down to a case of buyer’s remorse. We have this particular phenomenon in common with Richard Green, and doubtless that gallery’s invoices make the same disclaimers as to price as well as condition. Also, the prospective buyer is assumed- and given our price points it is a very, very reasonable assumption- that the buyer is sufficiently sophisticated to ask whatever questions they might- from us or any other expert they wish to consult.

During my brief professorial career, I would typically conduct my class meetings in the better public galleries, and as this all took place in London, one can imagine the splendid offerings in front of which I would expatiate. Actually, that didn’t happen much, expatiate, I mean, as I was always more interested in what the students were interested in, and found the time spent a bit more productive if there was interaction. Of course, Socrates figured all this out quite a little while ago, and doubtless did this lots better than I ever could. Nevertheless, query and response were always my method. For those students who expected whatever I had to say to wash over the top of them, as it were, and then to have information absorbed like liniment- well, it never happened that way.

In any event, the question I always began with, oftentimes in the National Gallery, was what is it that constitutes a piece of museum quality? Trick question, but the answers I typically got were the obvious ones, and usually, perhaps always, with ‘masterpiece’ as a defining term. My gentle readers will doubtless recoil at the use of this overworked, and inaccurately used, term. ‘Masterpiece’ for those in the trade is more specifically defined, as it would in any guild from the 12^th century onward, as the workshop production of someone of some seasoning and acknowledged skill who then executes something of sufficient quality within his sphere to then qualify as a master. Apprentice, then journeyman, then master. Simple, and simply defined for 10 centuries.

But that doesn’t answer what I had hinted was a trick question, viz what constitutes museum quality- and the answer, simply that it is in a museum. The fact is, in the best institutional collections supported by the best curatorial scholarship, pieces end up there that while they may be good, they also may not be. One can watch the auction market these days to find that pieces once vaunted and given pride of place in some of the world’s best collections are sold off- ‘sold to support future acquisitions’, which is code for saying the piece is not quite as good as once thought. Often, though, what was acquired had at least as much to do with who gave the object as the object itself. If something is presented to a museum by a particular grandee, the acquisitions committee would be at great pains to turn it down.

It is sadly the case that one of my favorite museums, The Bishop Museum in Honolulu, is now possessed of a shall we say questionable ki’i representing a war god, given it in 2018 by tech titan Marc Benioff. Purchased at Christie’s in Paris by Benioff for about $7,500,000 for the specific purpose of giving it to the Bishop Museum, it has been characterized by ethnographic dealer Daniel Blau as ‘the sort of thing you see in a tiki bar.’ That the ki’i has gone on display at the Bishop Museum as the centerpiece of a major exhibition has so far generated a fair bit of heat, as the piece has no known provenance prior to the 1940’s. Frankly, when it was offered last year, it appeared to me the piece was in much, much too good a condition and with the carving much too crisp to be of the age it was claimed. To my knowledge, there was no scientific testing done to determine age- either prior to auction or subsequently- with reliance given to recent provenance, that of the private collection of tribal art dealers father and son Pierre and Claude Verite.

With a discussion about the piece published in a recent edition of The New York Times penned by their redoubtable arts journalist Scott Reyburn, Mr Reyburn hints that donor Marc Benioff might be in trouble with the IRS for having donated an expensive work that may be shown to be worth substantially less. If Mr Benioff were duped, it appears to me that his motivation for making the purchase for immediate repatriation to Hawaii shows nothing more than that his heart is in the right place. For the time being, the ki’i remains on display and given pride of place, but one wonders how much the Bishop Museum has overlooked before it was accepted as part of its permanent collection. That Mr Benioff would by any nonprofit organization be considered a heavy hitter might in this day and age of difficult sledding for public institutions of art and culture might result in an occlusion of normal curatorial skepticism.

For myself, I can say that very many of my own acquisitions of Hawaiiana were made in Europe- fascinated as Europeans were with the exotic ethnographica collected in the late 18^th and through the middle of the 19^th centuries, I do find from time to time isolated good pieces that have come on to the art market, though with a provenance lost in the mists of time. But as with so much else, demand spurs imitation, and doubtless the interest in Hawaiian material resulted in the production of items that when they were produced may have been kitsch, but in the fulness of time, might now be seen as the genuine article. The now disputed ki’i was described when it was offered by Christie’s as a ‘mate’ to an example contained in the collection of the British Museum. Hmmm….a ‘mate’ you say? Were there multiples of this type of material produced in prediscovery Hawaii? No, there were not. Of a style, yes- multiples, no.  Perhaps something someone thought it worthwhile later to copy- not unlikely.

I notice from the article in The New York Times, the subject ki’i is carved from ‘Hawaiian medisteros’, or what any kama’aina would know more commonly as ‘ohia lehua. As it happens, I did acquire two ‘long’ ki’i from an ethnographic collection in England. Tall and heavy, with some age, the ki’i in my own collection were probably shall we say repurposed from old railway sleepers, something in abundant supply from the late 19^th century when so much of Hawaii island was cleared for the planting of sugar cane. Was I duped into thinking my acquisitions were prediscovery? No, but perhaps if I had the length of purse of someone much better heeled my resultant cost might have been much different.

For those few of my gentle readers who are not amongst the cognoscenti, I have to tell you that Oscar night, along with Halloween and San Francisco Pride weekend, constitute the total of gay high holidays for the year. Keith McCullar and I, as keepers of tradition, did then yesterday quickly absent ourselves from another engagement, hieing away home to watch the Academy Awards. What a waste of time, but much much more on that in a bit.

I rather misspoke in the first paragraph, as our watching the Oscar ceremony is just not keeping the faith with other gay men, but rather with one in particular. It was our habit many years ago to annually watch the Oscars with a group of friends, one of whom was particularly dear. Larry would always make this an event, including cold cracked Dungeness crab, with a variety of seasoned mayonnaises. That all this occurred in San Francisco and environs you’ve probably already divined. It did, of course, and sadly most of those with whom we enjoyed this annually are now gone, including dear Larry, dead in 1992 of HIV. Keith and I don’t always speak of it, but we know in our heart of hearts our insistence on watching the Oscars and having cold cracked Dungeness crab is in memory of former days. We have, though, consigned Larry’s insistence on serving strawberry margaritas along with the crab to the dustbin of history.

Last night was a crappy show, doubtless made worse by the Academy’s decision to go forward without a host. Sans host, it was apparently also the decision to generally scrap anything fun and lighthearted. Where is Billy Crystal when you need him? Mind you, I am not taking issue with the Academy’s decision to offload the comic who was scheduled to host. His not so subtle attacks on those in the LGBT community contained within his comedy act were not just offensive but antithetical to the inclusivity the Academy is at long last accomplishing. That he said he had dropped all of this from his act is a matter of too little much, much too late. Too late indeed, as the offensive material was a component part of his act- not 30 years ago, not 20 years ago- but less than 10 years ago. His public mea culpa on Ellen Degeneres’ TV show was characterized by Ellen as redemptive, but here she and I part company.

But all this specific controversy aside, the plain fact is the Oscars ceremony has been running downhill for years, simply because it is a bore. Too slow, too much auxiliary fluff, and not enough action. I enjoy big screen entertainment, and I want to be entertained watching the small screen, too. What now passes for entertainment- although the why of this mystifies me- is the red-carpet arrival of the celebrities. What was for decades an incidental part of any Hollywood gathering has now moved centerstage, with female stars victimized by the fashion industry, forced to pose for photos- backs arched and chests pushed out- then pulled aside and forced to make unintelligible response to vapid questions posed by the hosts of TV morning shows.

This year it was the year of the train, with so many of these poor women wearing a gown odd in itself, to which a superfluous train had been appended. How so many of the women were able to navigate the red carpet, to say nothing of ascending steps to the stage if they were so lucky I’ll never know. This, of course, compounded by the obscenely high heeled shoes they all wore. Note for next year’s ceremony- have some game female presenter catch her heel in her train and fall on her tush- it will be the hit of the show. Poor Bette Midler was underutilized in last night’s outing- put this up to her, and I’ll bet she’d be game.

What to do, what to do? Shall we plan to watch next year’s ceremony? It is frankly now an open question in our household, despite our nostalgic, albeit wistful, connection with the Oscars. I would opine it is likewise an open question for the presenting network, with so very few advertisers underwriting the broadcast we counted a number of small, local businesses hawking their wares. While our counting the number of local adverts in the run of the Oscars might seem an odd occupation, it broke the monotony of the show, and is, I suppose, emblematic of the tedium the Academy Awards ceremony has now become.