Author: chappell_scott

One of the trade publications I peruse- online, of course- this morning touted the launch of a new website providing support for those of us who post their items for sale on a variety of selling platforms. What this new support service offers is the ability to post one place- their own site- which posts can then be simultaneously posted on whatever other sales platforms where the dealer happens to maintain a virtual storefront. This ability, the support site claims, removes from the dealer their biggest contemporary hassle, keeping their inventory listings consistent across numerous websites.

So that you know, I long ago gave up wearing three cornered hats, and it has been years since I wrote with a quill pen dipped in ink made from oak galls and soot. By this I mean that I do operate in the current age, am able to not only turn on my desk top, lap top, and hand held device, and not only receive information therefrom, but also to send out information to various and sundry. And this includes fielding the occasional inquiry from a punter, and eventually accomplishing the sale of an item or two of my stock in trade.

I have to say, the least hassle I have is to maintain an online record of my inventory offerings. Since inception, Chappell & McCullar has maintained a website, and cottoned on to the fact that keeping our stock and other information on our website is essential to its placement on the various search engines. For all that has changed in technology, which alters by the minute, this is one feature that has remained the same. Online marketing is old news, and although we now sell almost entirely in a virtual environment, in the old bricks and mortar days it was rarely that we welcomed a new visitor who hadn’t already visited our website.

Early on, that is 20 years ago when we opened up on Jackson Street in San Francisco, our integrated online inventory program that also allowed us to maintain customer records and generate invoices and shipping records, seemed a hassle to a luddite like me, but using it was a skill to be learned. And, wonder of wonders, what we entered one time could then with the magic of Windows, be copied and pasted onto anything else online. In all honesty, I can’t say that fiddling with technology is my favorite occupation, but since the get-go, Keith McCullar and I knew it was not just a necessary, but more an essential adjunct to our business.

In fairness, I’ll admit that an integrated program for online platforms might be useful, particularly as the shrinking numbers of dealers in the art and antiques trade means a shrinking number of staff, particularly those of a younger age who might have, shall we say, a greater technical proficiency. However, very many of those younger folk who might have become the next generation of traders are to be found in the backrooms of the platforms themselves. The proliferation of these platforms, and we’re invited to join a new one nearly every week, has long functioned to dilute the ability of the established dealer to establish what is critical to the dealer’s survival- a customer relationship. While we’re always happy for the one-off, spot sale, most dealers will acknowledge that their business is not sustained by that. It is the customer who likes the look of one or several dealers, who, although a purchase might be made one at a time, will over the course of years return again and again. Platforms, indeed, the entire internet, affords a prospective buyer nearly infinite choice. ‘Spoiled for choice’ as the saying goes, but in this context, the spoliation is the dwindling numbers of dealer and customer relationships.

So I suppose that’s where I get to, with anything the makes it easier to post one’s stock online. It is at the end of the day online storefronts that are at once both the bane of and an essential adjunct to the survival of the trade. The bane, of course, that the best part of the experience of not just the dealer but also the prospective punter, is moved inexorably into the arid ether of the internet.

Certainly I would share with others in the trade a preference for being on my hands and knees with a torch examining 18th century joinery, or in a darkened room with a black light determining retouchings on a period painting, ideally in the company of a client, but online sales are not just a fact, but essential to a dealer’s survival. And survival, in anyone’s language, is the name of the game

Keith McCullar and I would not immediately be described as gregarious, and in this benighted burg we spend quite a bit of time in our recliners watching our, I don’t know, 20,000 channels of TV. Yes, we do moderate a bit of that with nearly daily trips to the gym, trying to ameliorate the form our midsections have become to match the form of the recliner seats. But still, not much social contact beyond those limited to our business, and as Keith has it lately ‘I feel like a shut-in’.

Not too surprising, then, that Keith sought to take the matter in hand, deciding at long last to take advantage of the invitations posted by a local bon vivant to attend a Friday mixer for the local, shall we say, cognoscenti. We did go and found that as there were only a handful of folk attending, no drinks and conviviality were on offer, but only dinner. That we didn’t want- and didn’t need- and quickly therefore absented ourselves, followed, it must be said, by the bon vivant who had extended the invite, promising that in future a venue would be found more conducive to mixing. I hope so.

However, as Keith and I had made something of an effort and in anticipation of some refreshment, we decided to carry on to another watering hole. I have to say at this point that we do both of us enjoy a drink. For my gentle readers’ benefit, you needn’t smirk and nudge one another, as ‘enjoy a drink’ is not meant as euphemistic understatement. In fact, it is as just as written, that we like to go out once or twice a month, and have a drink each, and possibly some kind of bar snack shared between us, and then go home.

Sounds dull, I know, but it is a habit born in late years when we’d man our gallery in Jackson Square on Saturdays just the two of us, when we’d often be met by clients or colleagues at closing time, and it would be, appropriately, time for refreshments. For clients, this usually meant sampling the supply we did then and do now have on hand to slake the thirst and loosen the tongue. But for dealer colleagues, it was a different matter. Our premises were too much like their own premises, and we mutually would decide to enjoy each other’s company in a venue that looked less like the place of our labours. A couple of weeks ago I posted a photo on my Facebook page of Rick Scott, a friend of long standing and a San Francisco dealer of some renown, and it was Rick with whom, late on Saturday afternoon, we would frequently venture forth.

We were, frankly, spoiled for choice. As our gallery was on Jackson Street between Sansome and Montgomery, we could walk to Tosca or the Comstock Saloon along Columbus Avenue, or take advantage of the hotel bars in a number of nearby hostelries- the Palace, the St Francis, the Four Seasons, or what became our favorite, and remains the SF home away from home for Keith and me, Le Meridien at Clay and Battery. Initially drawn by their happy hour special of $8 Manhattans, we’d stay for their fine selection of bar snacks and happily found that, for years, the bar and kitchen staff were unchanged and cheerfully acknowledged our patronage whenever we were there. If all this sounds cloyingly like something out of ‘Cheers’ or even ‘Duffy’s Tavern’, you’d be correct. A drink out is really a drink out if it is accompanied by an hospitable venue.

This is all written, gentle readers, by means of prefacing our subsequent experience this last Friday, quickly leaving before we even got started what we had looked forward to as a casual, convivial early evening opportunity for a drink. Getting into the car, we decided to move on to a venue only a block from our offices. We don’t go there all the time, but at least locally, it is our favourite and most frequently patronized. Dimly lit and clubby- in a quilted red leather sort of way- and with a good selection of bar food, it is owned and run by a young man, the scion of a local grandee, who always recognized us and was in every way a good host. Lately, though, he’s been very much absent, taken up with the establishment of a small chain of- wait for it- poke restaurants. So, disappointing to say, when we went to our preferred venue, we were met by someone at the host’s station who didn’t know us- which is forgivable- but didn’t care to either. We know when we’re not welcome, so we left.

And where then what became for us a small quest take us? We went home, our thirst unslaked and our bottoms then planted in our pair of recliners in front of the TV. This is greatly condensed, this part, as Keith and I did in fact discuss other options, limited though they were, but none were appealing. We were faced with the naked fact of the dearth of local hospitality, with very few watering holes locally of the cocktail lounge variety, and virtually nothing of the hotel bars we’ve enjoyed elsewhere. Now I will readily admit that where we’ve lived in late years, and to those places we’ve had the opportunity to travel, we’ve been, as written above, spoiled for choice. Even so, our local burg has a population approaching a million, and why is it, I ask, that it cannot support a single four star, to say nothing of a five-star, hotel? This remains an open question.

This blog entry will seem familiar to one of my Facebook friends, the young man who cuts my hair and did so late yesterday afternoon, to whom I related this tale of droughty woe, but as befits his trade he has his ear to the ground and eye to the keyhole and was able to tell me that some relief was at hand. My gentle readers will doubtless remember my frequent encomia to Fresno’s premier bar and restaurant of blessed memory, The Daily Planet. It was taken over by a team of young caterers and run as an events venue as The Painted Table. There have been rumours for quite some time that the venue would open to the public, and apparently this has been confirmed in the local press, but more reliably by our gentleman’s hairdresser David Stone at LaVogue.

I have to say, we have used The Painted Table on several occasions and found their catering service to be top notch- reasonably inventive cuisine professionally presented- and do look forward to their opening The Painted Table to the public, of whom Keith McCullar and I plan to be numbered. Mind you, The Painted Table chaps will have to clear a high bar given the longtime success of the Daily Planet, made even more successful in my mind’s eye with the passing of years. For the moment, though, we remain thirsty, but the prospective opening will be looked forward to in the same manner as the view of an oasis to a desert traveler.

Pablo Picasso ‘Personnage’, 1965- nearly laundered

Bloomberg is reporting today on a money laundering scam originating in London involving Matthew Green, scion of one of the most vaunted names in the art trade. Simply, it involved Green providing a painting to be purchased from an anonymous seller using dirty money- in this case a late work by Picasso- which Green would then resell in the retail art market, netting himself, presumably, a nice commission, and the remaining proceeds, clean now, remit to shady characters behind the scene.

In the trade, this kind of scam is an old, old story- art or antiques purchased abroad for cash, then brought duty free to this country and sold legitimately. Easy peasy, and very, very difficult to stop. For ourselves, we have witnessed what we concluded was an influx of dirty money with dealers whose inordinate expansion and acquisition of stock seemed out of reasonable proportion to their sales. At a certain level, the trade involves a relatively small number of players, and it is hard for a dealer to keep his activity entirely to himself. Most of us deal with the same small pool of clients, and while clients do prefer to trade with only a few dealers, there is enough shall we say crossover that one invariably finds out about significant private purchases.

And of course, too, there is and has been for centuries a thriving gray market in art and antiques from which underworld types and dealers who are of a mind might, shall we say, ‘source’ items for cash for resale in the open market. With yet untold thousands of works looted by the Nazis still floating around unaccounted for, there are still plenty of pieces to acquire. The underworld appreciates the inherent value, and indeed the cachet of utilizing fine art as both a vector for money laundering and as a crypto currency. Donna Tartt’s novel of a few years ago, The Goldfinch, centered around a Dutch old master painting that was used as surety by mob types. And I’ve heard it suggested that the paintings stolen from the Gardner Museum are thought to be now in use in the same manner.

While I wouldn’t say the trade is any less honest than any other business, it is rather more secretive and this might make it easier for its infiltration by those who seek to launder cash. Even in the most straightforward sales, buyers and sellers wish to remain private. While we do hear about some of the larger sales at auction- witness the purchase of the crypto da Vinci- in the main, the well-heeled like to keep their wealth away from prying eyes.

Matthew Green has now sadly joined nefarious company with Knoedler, Berry Hill Galleries, Salander-O’Reilly, and Mallett. One might presume that it is the nature of the trade, but something to note- these are dealers whose business in London and New York is very, very expensive to pay for. Another feature, dealers sometimes fall into the trap of wanting to maintain a lifestyle akin to that of their clients, and once geared up, when the money stops flowing, find themselves backed into doing things they might not otherwise. Mind you, I’ve cited some high profile bad apples, but the trade internationally constitutes a small-ish barrel. But before my gentle readers believe that the auction houses are the place to trade, I would point out that they are not precisely bastions of probity, either. The huge commission price fixing scandal involving Christie’s and Sotheby’s is not yet ancient history.

I’ve just finished reading the study authored by the redoubtable Sir David Cannadine entitled ‘Why collect?’ commissioned by Art Fund and the Wolfson Foundation. With the focus primarily on art museums, the impetus was to consider why it is, given the large amounts of money given through, for example, the Heritage Lottery Fund, museums are nevertheless pretty generally floundering.

In a brief article in the recent online edition of Apollo, Robert Hewison distills Cannadine’s study into the following abstract- museums have abandoned their traditional core mission of acquisition and curatorial scholarship in favor of education, outreach, and inclusivity. Modern notions of political correctness, for both authors, are not much of a consideration, as they lay the blame for museum malaise at the feet of the pervasive influence of postmodernists like the late Michel Foucault, for whom museums in their traditional guise functioned as no more than institutional excrescences whose primary objective was to enhance the political, social, and economic hegemony of northern Europe.

While I suppose reinvention, even if that reinvention results in a throwback to an earlier day, might arguably work to instill some vigour, what both authors mention obliquely is, to my mind, nearer the mark. Specifically, for some (read ‘very many’) museums, their day is done.

Certainly in this country in the late 19^th and most notably the first half of the 20^th centuries, a source of local pride was the building of a grand edifice to house art treasures- mostly European- aping as it did both in its collections and its building European imperial glory of past centuries. Local grandees in places like Des Moines, St Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Detroit considered an art museum on a grand scale to be an essential feature of urbanity, marking not just the prosperity which made the building and the stuffing of it with art treasures, but serving as an emblem of sophistication and optimism for a future that would be grander than the past.

Well- it hasn’t been, the future I mean, not entirely, anyhow. Everyone knows about the so-called ‘grand bargain’ that saved the Detroit Institute of Arts from selling off its collections to pay the city’s debts and even more prominently the venerable Metropolitan Museum of Art is having a severe financial struggle. While museum attendance numbers dwindle overall, and costs of basic maintenance, to say nothing of the not just politically correct but oftentimes mandated education and outreach programs, these efforts at modernity have generally not paid off. Not so long ago, a local art museum person told me how a recent exhibition of the decorative arts of Southeast Asia had been successfully supported by the local Hmong community. My rejoinder was it was natural for the Hmong to turn out- what would have been impressive was to see it supported by all the other ethnicities comprising the local community.

By in large, though, I am at one with Foucault- the survey art museum continues to be very largely the province of the social and political elite of northern European heritage, with education and outreaches of inclusivity an add-on to comply with current notions of political correctness, to say nothing of government, grant, and accreditation requirements. Would though a return to an earlier day, with a renewed primary focus on acquisitions and curatorship ameliorate any run off in attendance?

In some instances, perhaps. In his article, Hewison begins by citing the full day closure of the National Portrait Gallery in preparation for the use of its facility for a fashion show. While the fashion show was a money-spinning venue hire, Hewison said the closure was at the expense of turning away 5,000 visitors. No question, the NPG is a viable institution, whose mission to stay open free of charge must needs then field fundraising activities to continue to make it accessible. Bear in mind, the fashion show was held on site, bringing not only those attendees but presumably a few deep pocketed grandees who might not otherwise have darkened the threshold. Whether or not the NPG, to continue, would benefit from additional acquisitions is an open question. For myself, I never tire of making my way to the top floor to see the Tudor portraits, even if only to see for the umpteenth time the full length Holbein cartoon of Henry VIII. New acquisitions, though? As the name and function imply, the museum continuously adds images of the great and the good, and even exhibits its holdings at ‘out station’ branches- the National Trust properties Montacute in the West Country, and Beningbrough Hall in North Yorkshire. To my mind, this is a well-functioning institution, where acquisitions though their effects cannot be measured, must certainly be considered as part of its viability.

I contrast this with the fate of our local art museum, just finished with its annual fundraising bash held not at the museum but offsite. Presumably, museum management and governance must have assumed no one locally would be particularly interested in attending anything at the museum, but the party was what intrigued donors. While again the function is to raise money to keep the museum open and affordable, its typical attendance is so light it can only justify unlocking the front door 4 days out of the week. Where the NPG might have 5,000 attendees in a day, the local institution wouldn’t have that many in two months.  The question then in this case is clearly begged- for whom is the museum operating? And the larger question certainly being asked in the trustees’ meetings- why stay open at all?

So, then, any public museum, large or small, big city, formerly big city, and small city in this day and age must constantly be faced with similar questions and I don’t mean the ‘Why collect?’ posed by Cannadine and Hewison.  I would initially add a subsidiary question ‘For whom are you collecting?’ If this question cannot be answered by way of robust visitor numbers, then the more basic question must always be on the mind of those in the museum world- ‘why stay open at all?’

Of all the good times I’ve had in my life, those enjoyed in Houston particularly stand out. We’ve been privileged to do a great deal of business in Houston and environs and without exception, we’ve been generously gifted by Houstonians with extraordinary hospitality.

In light of Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath, it may be a small thing encouraging my gentle readers to join me in sending relief to those beleaguered from its effects.

For very many years, we participated in Houston’s Theta Charity Antiques Show at the George R Brown Convention Center.  While we know Houston will bounce back, we know as well that the charity endeavors of the Theta ladies will in no small part assist that effort.

Many hands, they say, make light work. Let’s see how many hands we can contribute to lighten the work ahead for all Houstonians.