notes

Leon Lock is one of the most intelligent and urbane men of my acquaintance- a gentleman in every sense of the word, whose friendship I’ve had for nearly 20 years since the time we were doctoral students in the department of the history of art at University College London. Since 2002, Dr Lock has been the director of the Low Countries Sculpture Society in Brussels, itself an expression of the sophistication and civility that marks arguably the most civilized region of our troubled planet.

It is contrasted with this that we witness the tragedy that befell Brussels this morning, wrought with an eye toward the commission of a barbarous act that sets the pace of humanity back 1,000 years. With Europe’s open borders an expression of an attempt to overcome ethnic divisions that predate history, this act of terrorism will doubtless work to slow, if not stifle, a model for liberality the entire world should emulate. Indeed, the present ‘Brexit’ debate and those favoring it in the United Kingdom were certainly given impetus by what happened today.

Sadly, it is not only the Boris Johnson’s of the world who seek insularity as the cure for all international ills, but here at home, Donald ‘Torquemada’ Trump is renewing calls for the use of torture to prise secrets from terrorists. And with this, we must all realize, the terrorists have won. While we may seek to foil terrorist plotting, its response by a benighted few may succeed in prising from the rest of us not just our liberties but the better angels of our nature.

In 2005, I was in London’s West End at the time of bombings. Indeed, the bus that blew up was just around the corner from Gordon Square- the heart of University College London. I remember well, with the consequent cessation of public transportation, walking back from Bond Street along Bayswater Road, returning to our flat in Notting Hill. Keith and I shared this walk with thousands of others, and we were struck at the time with the doggedness of it, the determination to literally and figuratively put one foot in front of another, getting on with the business of life.

I pray that Leon Lock is unhurt by today’s terrible events, but likewise pray for those who are not. But I also pray that the better world the best people in the world seek to create is not forever scuttled.

Addendum:

Leon has emailed to say he’s fine, but his office on Trierstraat is only 20 metres,  a mere stone’s throw,  from the bombed Maelbeek metro station.

Dealers push excreta through the fan blades, following 1^st dibs draconian changes. Read more in the New York Times:

On Tuesday evening, a sign was placed in the window of Lost City Arts, a high-end vintage design store in Lower Manhattan, saying the shop was closing early. Inside, 30 of the city’s top antiques dealers had gathered for a tense, hastily arranged meeting. Other dealers dialed in from Texas and California to hear the proceedings.

The topic: the online antiques marketplace 1stdibs and its new approach for enforcing commissions.

Jim Elkind, Lost City’s owner, addressed his colleagues, who sat amid the kind of $4,000 Italian floor lamps and $2,800 midcentury modern low tables that are routinely sold (or just ogled) on 1stdibs.

“This sort of reminds you of that moment in ‘The Godfather’ when all the heavyweight bosses from the mafia show up to the big party,” Mr. Elkind said to laughs. “I think we are a formidable group here.”

But as the dealers began to voice their concerns and frustrations, it became clear they view themselves not as powerful figures but as little guys being pushed around and financially squeezed by an influential company they have come to rely on.

Under its new guidelines, which are to take effect April 4, 1stdibs requires that all sales resulting from what it calls a “1stdibs lead,” or interaction generated on the site, be processed through the company, so it can charge a commission of as much as 10 percent. The move effectively closes a loophole whereby dealers could finish a negotiation offline, thus avoiding the fee.

The company will also start monitoring and recording conversations that take place over a message center and dedicated phone number where dealers and buyers interact.

“The idea of them having a recording of all of our phone calls, it feels Orwellian,” said Paul Donzella, owner of Donzella in TriBeCa and a 1stdibs dealer for more than a decade, who attended the meeting. “If I ask the buyer for their phone number, the site’s detectors will pick up those keywords and shut the communication down.”

Some dealers (though not Mr. Donzella) have already experienced such a rebuke from 1stdibs. And they said they are troubled by the way, in their view, 1stdibs is prizing revenue growth over dealer relationships, and increasingly removing the ability for them to work directly with clients or be forthright.

For instance, since 2014, dealers have been forbidden to tell buyers that 1stdibs charges transaction fees or refer to “1stdibs fees of any kind.” Guy Regal of Newel, a decorative arts store on the Upper East Side, told his colleagues at the meeting that it puts dealers in a difficult spot both financially and ethically. 

Other dealers present, including Eric Appel and Dobrinka Salzman, said they would most likely have to raise prices or reduce or eliminate the discounts they routinely give to interior designers and architects. Yet they can’t tell their clients why.

“Do you understand the politics of that?” Mr. Regal said in a phone interview later, explaining that the antiques business is based on relationships. “You don’t spend $60,000 on something without seeing it, talking to the dealer and getting a sense of who they are.”

Indeed, the old-school way of selling rarefied objects face to face is clashing with the culture of a tech company focused on growth. Once an exclusive club for a few hundred tastemakers to sell their curated wares, 1stdibs now has more than 2,000 dealers.

For all the complaints about 1stdibs and talk among the dealers about staging a walkout, many acknowledged its crucial importance to their business, as well as the site’s ability to expose their goods to a global clientele.

Founded in 2001, 1stdibs basically pushed the antiques business into the 21st century, allowing dealers to rely less on costly brick-and-mortar stores and reduce the amount of time and money they spend on marketing. In recent years, the company has aggressively ramped up its staff and marketing in its ambition to become a major global brand such as Christie’s or Sotheby’s.

David Rosenblatt, the chief executive of 1stdibs, defended the new policy as necessary for the company’s continued growth, saying that when he was hired five years ago, the site began transitioning from a place for dealers to advertise their goods to an e-commerce platform. The improved site, he said, has resulted in favorably negotiated deals with shippers, programs like fraud protection for dealers and online sales of $150 million so far.

“Like any company, we need to see a return on our marketing investment,” Mr. Rosenblatt said, explaining the reason for the dealer commission, which was introduced three years ago but difficult to enforce. (The site also generally charges dealers a fixed monthly fee and per-item listing fees that are credited back to them if the item sells through 1stdibs.)

Mr. Rosenblatt added that the new monitoring system was needed to prevent dealers from steering buyers offline to avoid paying a commission. Those dealers, he said, “reduce our ability to market on their behalf. We wake up every morning thinking about how to grow their business.”

While some dealers feel the fees are excessive (“They’re triple- and quadruple-dipping,” one exasperated dealer said at the Lost City meeting), others say the potential for profit and prestige is worth the cost.

“If you are providing me with a top-notch clientele all over the world, I am not going to be questioning the fees,” said Jimmy Lam, owner of Antique Textiles Galleries in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “I am selling double or triple what I was selling three years ago,” before joining 1stdibs.

Mr. Rosenblatt said the customers will ultimately decide — and they are choosing to shop online. “If the dealers are not comfortable,” he said, “they have the ability to move their business elsewhere.”

One of the delights of participating in the Los Angeles Antiques Show, now, sadly, of blessed memory, was the one- never- knew experience of the entertainment celebrities one might have even brief face time with. Particularly when the ladies guild of Cedars Sinai Hospital was the benefit charity, the gala preview was a welter of attendees of the great and good. A simple country lad me, I put my foot in it more than once, asking an unrecognized Harvey Weinstein, for instance, what he did for a living. His tongue in cheek response was ‘I own a small production company.’

An occasional attendee was the very petite presence of Nancy Reagan, who darkened the precincts of our stand in 2005 and 2006. Small and well dressed, and with a discreet security detail, she did on a couple of occasions ask questions of us about a couple of items, and then moved on. Both times, after the fact, Keith and I queried one another why it was we didn’t ask her the why of the tragically laggard response the White House had to the AIDS crisis. No question, with her own experience in the entertainment community, including, amongst others, her close and decades-long relationship with openly gay designer William Haines, her husband and she certainly had a level of familiarity with the gay community that, years before the death of Rock Hudson in 1985, they and particularly she certainly knew what was happening.

Time goes on, however, and I am ashamed to admit it, our own commercial imperative prevailed- we were, after all, at the Los Angeles Antiques Show in order to earn our daily crust- so beyond talking amongst ourselves, and one or two others, nothing of significance came of the Nancy sitings beyond being able to include these episodes as anecdotes.

However, early in 2008, Mrs. Reagan came tangentially- but significantly- into our ambit when we sold a William and Mary cabinet on stand to a Los Angeles celebrity, whose home our celebrity client had acquired from celeb cum media mogul Merv Griffin, by then deceased. We knew Merv was gay as pink ink, with an ex- wife and another female celeb- Eva Gabor- who for years ‘bearded’ for him, and also that he was on such close terms with the Reagans he was an honorary pall bearer at Ronald Reagan’s funeral.

It was a wonderful house, with a tennis and swimming pool pavilion that rivaled the size and elegance of a fine home. However, one of the striking things about the lovely landscaping was a large rose garden. Our celebrity client told us that it had been laid out and the roses selected for Merv by Nancy Reagan. Keith and I were particularly struck by this, bringing to the fore yet again a perplexity of why, with this level of intimacy and a level of intimacy she shared with so many other gay men, Nancy Reagan, and of course her husband, did so little and did so late even acknowledge the AIDS epidemic.

I suppose Nancy Reagan’s silence mirrored the traditional silence in Hollywood about gay men in the entertainment industry, which silence yet remains overarching. I suppose. But it was a silence that as ACT-UP has it, did then and does now equal death. Precisely how Mrs. Reagan was able to overlook this tragedy which she must have seen from a front row seat is impossible to know, and difficult to forgive.

It is now, however, a question for the ages.

A reprise of Michael’s blog entry about Honolulu from a couple of years ago. With Michael and Keith just back from a month there, new entries about the built environment in Honolulu will follow.

The risk run when one speaks of preservation is always of marking oneself out as exclusionary, or put another way, ‘I’ve got mine and can afford to keep it for my sole enjoyment.’ I’ll let you draw the ‘…and to hell with the rest of you’ implication. The other risk, of course, is to be considered an anachronist and consequently little regarded. As my father says from time to time, ‘If we all of us had foresight the way we have hindsight, we’d all be ahead by a damn sight.’ Descriptively put, and highly accurate. No, we can’t turn back the clock but in what matters is it not worthwhile to review and learn from what the fullness of time might have shown up as errors in judgment?

The building of the Ala Wai Canal in the 1920’s, indeed all the alteration of the natural environment in Hawaii and elsewhere that rocketed forward beginning in the early years of the last century were byproducts of what seemed the eternal watchword for all that was good in society- progress. In an effort to bring about what was thought the best for the most, what was existing, in both the natural and built environments, was thought if not actually bad, then at least suspect. The natural environment was exploited for what it was then considered- a malleable raw material that, with man’s active involvement, could always be improved. Although the confidence in man’s abilities reflects the tenor of those recent times, even at this near term vantage point we can agree that, to a large extent, that confidence was actually hubris.

What appeared as gradual improvement then became a juggernaut that, surprisingly, still proceeds apace.  Mindsets changed to those more reflective that seek to slow, eliminate, or even reverse earlier errors in environmental judgment even now seldom win out over the mindset so fervently embraced in the last century. I was surprised, for example, when watching a broadcast of the Kamehameha School’s Song Contest to hear one of the young participants explain his future goal to become the Donald Trump of Hawaii. How surprising it was to hear, given the level of immersion in traditional Hawaiian culture of all Kam School students- one would presume the predominant movement, to the exclusion of all others, would be to stop, if not reverse, the predations wrought by real estate developers. I would argue that the world can ill afford one Donald Trump. Astonishing that anyone in Hawaii would propose there might be room for two.

A few years ago, the Honolulu Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of the work of the late Honolulu architect Vladimir Ossipoff. I believe the excellent book and catalog prepared by curator Dean Sakamoto is still in print and it is worth a read. What one takes away from it is the effort Ossipoff made, certainly at the height of his career, to use contemporary materials and link them sympathetically with the natural environment to yield what might be termed built organicism. Something that, while manmade for man’s use and while fully functional, nevertheless articulates properly- by which I mean as an adjunct not as an intrusion- with its setting. One seldom sees high rise buildings that accomplish this- unless they’re mid rise Ossipoff designs.

The last several Januarys have brought with them a recurring query, wondering if our business spikes the result of interest in ‘Downton Abbey’. Oh that Julian Fellowes had written in some particular storyline about an interest in fine art and period furnishings amongst the gentry, besides that it is a redoubtably constant feature in the background and suitable for the human drama played out in front.

By this longwinded intro, what I mean to say is, no- so far there has yet to be any rush of business where perhaps the show now winding down in season 6 might be thought to have set a (renewed) fashion for period furnishings. This though is surprising, given the popularity of the series and it begs question why. Just before Christmas, The Economist published an article entitled ‘Out with the old’, describing the plight of the dealer in period decorative arts, with several opinions cited therein that all has been rejected in favor of the modern. It would seem, if this were roundly true, that this would detract from the popularity of ‘Downton Abbey’, now regarded as the most popular series of entertainments in the history of public broadcasting.

One wonders, with its emphasis on historical accuracy, the series might not too effectively evoke its time- while the narrative and characters are engaging, the setting seems remote and exotic. Perhaps this combination of elements renders the series as entirely escapist for most viewers, and not anything they could emulate, so they do not seek to even in its appearance. And most of the upstairs life looks expensive, as indeed it was. I would say that even the wealthiest dot.com billionaire would blanch at the prospect of reproducing the likes of Highclere Castle.

So for the next little while, all of us will have to enjoy the final season, and for years to come, reruns of past seasons, and consider ‘Downton…’ for what it was- an entertainment anomaly, and not a trendsetter. If ever comes a time, please let me know, though, if any of my gentle readers seek a Carlton House desk along the lines of one Lord Grantham uses- we would happily supply one to you.