notes

One of very many things I value is the cadre of craftspeople we rely on to put our stock in shape prior to its display in our galleries. I am put in mind of 18th century workshop practice, because we can have a number of crafts involved in the process. A piece of painted furniture, for instance the small japanned bureau on stand illustrated, had three- a painter to restore the surface decoration, a turner to replace one of the legs, and a bronzier to recast a replacement drawer pull. Suffice to say, the end product is something lovely, and in its result, the livery companies of a former day haven’t a patch on us.

It’s also apparent, though, that there’s a degree in backroom complexity associated with this business that one determines in the fullness of time. Moreover, there’s no master protocol associated with anything that requires restoration and the only blanket statement I can make is that everything, and I do mean everything, that we sell has required something done to it. Admittedly, we strive to acquire pieces, whether of the fine or decorative arts, that are in fairly good and largely original condition, but thinking that something might be in entirely, untouched original condition and in good enough nick to offer it untouched is folly. The general rule of thumb, and one to which most connoisseurs would subscribe, is that everything requires some significant work done to keep it in a reasonable state at least once every hundred years. That seems like not much, but bearing in mind that a number of our pieces are three centuries old means that, of necessity, things have been seen to a number of times.

When someone comes into our gallery and admires, in if the planets are in alignment actually purchases, one or more items of our stock, what they’ve also purchased is our assessment of what it took to put the item(s) in saleable condition. Mind you, though our backroom team does a great job, what they do is what we, after a great deal of consideration and back and forth palaver, direct them to do. As a consequence, when we’re asked by those who have yet to favor us with their custom about recommending a restorer, or more frequently asking us to undertake a restoration, we like as not will demur. Probably more than likely. Determining what it is that the client actually has in mind is a tedious task and always requires us, on the odd occasion that we actually undertake custom projects, to provide supervision that is no less time consuming than that required on pieces we actually plan to take into inventory. Further, we always, it seems, have a backup in our workrooms, with a fair number of our own pieces awaiting the magic touch, so slotting in a piece from elsewhere necessarily delays the completion of our own projects. So venal fellows that we are, we will for the indefinite future focus on the remunerative aspect of our business, the retail sale of art and antiques.

I suppose success always has it detractors, and as often as I see a sports miracle, some pundit has to minimize it by saying what extraordinary advantages in training athletes have today. This always begs question- if that’s so, why does the extraordinary happen so infrequently?

Witness last night’s Giants performance. Can anyone be anything less than ecstatic about Pablo Sandoval’s slams into each section of the outfield, with his three home runs allowing him to join ranks with, count them, only three other players in the history of the game- including the ever vaunted sultan of swats, Babe Ruth.

Astonishing game, through and through, that showed the heart and determination of those Giants. Barry Zito, fully redeemed 10 years after his Cy Young award, humiliating the Tigers’ offense. Perhaps the most frequent comment I’ve heard prior to last nights game was what a force Justin Verlander was to be reckoned with, enhanced doubtless by the rest the Tigers enjoyed after beating the Yankees for the American League pennant. Between Zito, Sandoval and the rest of the Giants lineup, the Tigers starter has certainly been taken down a considerable number of notches.

No choice, then, but to leave science behind as the Giants have done. How do you measure momentum, team spirit, and heart? That’s what really counts and clearly, the Giants have it in spades.

What else can one be in San Francisco but a Giants fan? This sounds metaphysical, and it’s meant to, but for all the science, technique and training brought to any endeavor, heart and perseverance are what, in the end, pay off. If the Giants come back victory to win the National League pennant is not a metaphor for lives well lived, I haven’t seen one.

For those of you who haven’t darkened our door, it might come as a surprise that San Francisco is a small-ish big city, and as a consequence, the Giants players and management are fairly frequently, and casually, on the local scene. Matt Cain is very nearly a near neighbor, living an unprepossessing existence just over the hill from us in Noe Valley. AT&T Park is probably as close to our galleries as Angel Pagan could throw from centre field. The Navy jets in yesterday’s flyover banked for their turn just over our house. Well, you get the idea.

I suppose the notion of near at hand intimacy, though, just amplifies the larger positives the teams’ performance represents. And Marco Scutaro? What more can be said? Look up ‘perseverance’ in the next edition of Webster’s and you’ll see his face.

And where do you think I’ll be late tomorrow afternoon? As if you had to ask! Go Giants!

With the fate of the Cork Street galleries nebulous at best, a feature article in Saturday’s Observer reports on the huge expansion of other galleries- many of them New York based, and seeking to capitalize on the presence of London’s burgeoning population of  über-rich expats.

With London as one of my preferred stomping grounds, it has always seemed that, in England, there was London, and then everywhere else. The fact of the matter is, despite a very slow British economy, central London real estate has done nothing but appreciate, driven, it seems, not just by bonuses paid to City types, but also by those ‘traditional’ ex pat populations, driven to London not only for an enjoyment of cosmopolitanism that may be lacking in, say, Baku, but also as safe havens for family, wealth, and personal security. The Observer reports a total of nearly 6,000 London inhabitants with a net worth of more than $30,000,000.

It is surprising, though, that the expanding galleries are those whose stock in trade is so similar to that of the struggling galleries. 20th and 21st century art drives, or fails to as the case may be, both. Traditionally, newly rich oligarchs would collect two things- art from their home culture that had at some time in the past left its place of origin, and quality European fine and decorative art already broadly established in the canon of art and design. Neither of these collecting channels are too surprising- for those newly rich, collecting what was often the court art of their home country brings about an association with a golden age and an aristocracy that, in many cases, has gone extinct. European art and antiques, of course, has long functioned to establish an affiliation with generic wealth, with the archetype for taste and culture in the modern age the European, and most specifically the English, aristocrat. It has always mystified me that, in the last few decades collectors from non-western cultures would be aggressive acquisitors of cutting edge western art. Perhaps it is that so many of the successful contemporary galleries have within their bag of tricks the magical ability to be market makers. The length of their purses is enhanced enormously by collectors whose objective in their own endeavors is to be market makers, who financially assist their pet gallery owners in making strategic high profile (read ‘record-breakingly expensive’) purchases of works by artists well represented in the collectors’ own collection. That, and the occasional monograph by an art historian who is able quickly to adopt some suitably recondite methodology and spit out enough adjectives to fill a volume of requisite size can often result in a successful, by which I mean highly profitable, series of gallery shows.

Canonicity is established in a variety of different ways and I suppose that some conscious manipulation of the art market by salting certain auctions with inordinate prices, is one ever so slightly nefarious way. And I suppose that those high net worth collectors not in on the deal have enough on the ball generally to know what it is they’re paying for. Or do they? I can’t help but think all this is more than a little like the snaky art dealer proffering the work of some minor contemporary artist in Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks, victimizing the well-heeled but otherwise parvenu wannabes. Did someone say ‘dupe’?

Yesterday I had a chat with a young man of long acquaintance, whose vocation as a business journalist means that, as well as knowing a collateralized debt obligation from a credit default swap, he’s also inquisitive. And inquire he did about what we colloquially term ‘the trade’. Over several beverages, I perhaps not waxed eloquent but yet always sufficiently loquacious, what we discussed elicited insights into the dynamics of this business that were certainly a surprise to my young friend- and as they are to me in the repeating.

Perhaps most surprising of all is my supposition that, while the trade captures the attentions of millions, those involved- sellers and buyers- amount to maybe 100,000 people on the planet. No question, the ranks of those who sell within the accredited trade have shrunk in the last decade, but those who are left- either through luck, trading skill, or depth of pocket book- have themselves had to make certain that their stock, their trading platform, and their palaver are consonant with and responsive to the small cadre that constitutes the buying public. And those buyers have never, ever been abundant. In our little business within this rarefied stratum, one’s inventory has to constitute an investment into the 7 or 8 figures. We are not, though, selling to ladies and gentleman with comparable net worth- we would, of course, but our material finds its way to high 8, and more likely 9 figure folk, whose acquisitive sense, we’ve come to discover, is through to their very marrow. They have money because they make money and are wont to let it out of their grasp. Not surprising, then, the sale of a  6 figure artwork or decorative item is always the subject of a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and requires a fair old bit of finesse on our part. What we’ve found, to our chagrin, is that our buyers find it very, very easy to walk away from a deal. They do it in their everyday lives- when a punter can walk away from a billion dollar gas lease upon which millions have already been spent in development costs, can one really expect it would be any less easy a matter to close the book on the sale of a $175,000 early Georgian bureau cabinet?

With all that, we have come to understand that despite a stratospheric net worth, everybody has a budget- and I do mean everybody. We have never, ever seen anyone encash an investment to make a purchase from us. Purchases are always made from cash on hand, and, if the sale extends beyond the buyers’ immediate cash limitations, we have never seen anyone reluctant to ask for a bit of time to complete the sale. Mostly we can accommodate, sometimes not, but I suppose the point of all this is, given the limited pool of buyers, if one can’t roll with the flow, one had better exit the trade.