Uncategorized

Various press reports over the course of the last couple of weeks cite a study prepared by a dealer organization to the effect that the traditional gallery model no longer works. Well, gee- come to the party. Traversing any art and antiques venue anywhere in the world and counting the ‘For Lease’ signs would probably function to give a body a strong suspicion that something is amiss.

But, then, visit any shopping street and count the vacancies. To deny a substantial linkage with three years of a weak global economy would be idiocy, but to completely lay the blame there would be at the least myopic. As with the business in fine art and antiques, the nature of retail marketing has changed profoundly, and while the state of the economy might subordinate the effect of this, it is, to my mind, such a profound and growing phenomenon that one would ignore it at one’s peril (read ‘get ready to put out the “For Lease” sign’).

Certainly anything available in multiples has the opportunity to be sold on the internet. When Macy’s offers free shipping for internet purchases, why then get in the car, struggle to park, and brave the crowds? But for those of us who sell one-off luxury items- antiques and artwork, where the collector will perforce require a personal examination of any item before making the decision to buy- there wouldn’t be any basis to compare internet activity. Or so one would think, but I must say, our internet sales now make up a significant portion of the activity of Chappell & McCullar.

That said, the bricks and mortar of our gallery space have not yet achieved an internet wrought obsolescence. What we’ve found is that for the majority of our collector clients, the initial sale is typically accomplished following the first visit to our gallery. Let me back up a bit further- the initial visit is almost invariably preceded by a visit to our website, which visit then impels the client to darken our door. Following the actual, and once the client determines that he likes what he sees, and that it accords with the online virtual, and makes that manifest by buying something from us, very, very often, subsequent purchases are made from our website. Certainly, site placement on the search engines and design and ease of use of the website are of increased importance, but for us, anyway, the maintenance of the gallery remains a critical and very central component. The net effect of this, though, is that our gallery footfall is slightly less than it was, but the percentage of those visitors who make a purchase is commensurately higher.

‘Not yet achieved an obsolescence…’, but, frankly, it is ineluctably moving that way with a small and growing number of buyers never crossing our threshold at all. We now have buyers all over the world with whom we negotiate electronically who find that it is cheaper and easier to provide us an earnest money deposit, and pay for shipping of an item that they are then able to examine on site at their leisure than it is to travel and shop. Well, of course- but this also put Chappell & McCullar on its mettle to develop a protocol to accommodate this kind of commerce. Times being the way they are, though, accommodating a new type of client is what I’d term a happy problem.

That we continue to carry on in business has some unlikely effects. One of them is that we’re inordinately targeted now by the allied trades- designers, restorers, and the like- seeking our custom, or perhaps as likely, that we might pass their details on to others. The net effect of all this is, beyond how it taxes the ability of our 8 year old server to deliver our spam email, is the time all of us in our gallery require to delete, and unsubscribe, so much of what might be charitably considered as drek.

That said, with so much of our business now electronically generated, none of us will wholesale delete and risk throwing out the serious inquiry with the spam bathwater. As a consequence, I read at least the headers and from time to time open emails I might not otherwise. Such was the case today, when I opened an email from a decorative painter, whose header cited a local designer’s project using, quoting now ‘a delightful mix of antiques and contemporary pieces.’ Well, of course, since our own gallery contains a delightful mix of antiques and contemporary pieces, I thought, in the spirit of affiliation, this email merited a quick read. I could have saved myself the trouble. The ‘antiques’ were, to put it succinctly, not, and while the mix to some eyes may have been delightful, all of what was rendered was a series of rooms fluffed up with cushions and tsatski .  That the antique pieces were more along the line of what’s now termed ‘vintage’ got me to thinking, then, about the recent rise in the use of this term and what seems its unfortunately broadened definition.

Our business is not exactly driven by etymological precision, but despite that, I’m still surprised by the inroads certain terms have made into the trade. ‘Vintage’ is one of them. From whence it has arisen, I don’t know, but it seemed to denote a piece of furniture that has some age to it, and might be of a period style but is itself not a period piece. Not so very long ago- say 6 months- this is what most people would have called ‘used furniture’, something a body might have found in a thrift store, or at a garage sale. Note that a few lines back I said ‘some age’ and not ‘antique’, as the dating of vintage pieces, as divined from the literature wherein the term was used, although fairly amorphous has never heretofore applied to anything approaching 100 years old.

Something that seems concomitant with the use of vintage pieces in design is the degree- the great degree- to which they lend themselves to being tarted up. A decorative paint finish, fanciful upholstery, and artful deployment all function to give pride of place to a piece that one might not otherwise fancy. But, then, this is where the interior designer comes in, and that is what a body ends up paying for. Time is money, and, times being the way they are, designers, should they wish to remain solvent, will scrupulously  supervise the refurbishment of a piece of vintage goods of otherwise limited value.

Was a time when, ironically, pieces of some significant value were altered by designers. Witness the predations of Syrie Maugham, whose white rooms of the 1920’s and 1930’s demanded that period furniture be stripped and ‘pickled’ in order to articulate. Certainly within an interior design context, vandalizing a period piece is reprehensible. I suppose, then, the rapid linguistic and intellectual segue from ‘vintage’ to ‘antique’ is, by comparison, less so. With all that, and in the middle age of my existence, I rather fancied thinking of myself as vintage. But ‘antique’? Now that’s reprehensible.

Can Bond Street be Bond Street without the redoubtable face of Mallett? Apparently it is going to have to adapt, as sooner rather than later, Fendi will be the new tenant of Mallett’s marquee location. Times being the way they are, it has been an open secret that Mallett had wished to shed their prestigious, but ruinously expensive, premises for quite some time. Although it’s reported they wish to maintain a showroom somewhere else in Mayfair, that location has so far not been named.

With Partridge’s very long drawn out, and very public, death throes and Mallett’s vicissitudes, Bond Street’s days as an antiques venue are numbered. But, then, the handwriting was clearly on the wall prior to the economic meltdown of 2008. Bad times functioned as something of a reprieve for all dealers in all venues around the world, as economic contraction kept encroaching luxury outlets at bay. It had occurred to me that, with the virtual shop displacing the actual, this temporary forbearance might in fact be permanent, with the Fendis of the world, selling as they do their ultra fashionable fashionables in multiples, internet buying would render less necessary the placement of a shop on- well, not on every corner, but certainly in the midst of every luxury venue.

Obliquely, that Fendi, to name one example, is back in a shop opening mode is a good thing, possibly indicating that, if not the larger economy, then at least the demand for luxury goods is on an upswing. While in the longer term, this might bode well for all of us who sell luxury goods, for the near term, though, the better capitalized luxury brands have a greater ability to renew their threat to co-opt all the limited space in the most desirable, best travelled shopping streets. For those ten or so of you who don’t know, Fendi is one of French luxury conglomerate LVMH’s many brands. With Fendi’s new, and Mallett’s old, strategic Bond Street location directly across from Sotheby’s main entrance, one wonders whether LVMH’s majority shareholder Bernard Arnault doesn’t also want a front row seat to witness what goes on at the auction house. Who knows? Perhaps fanciful, but possibly Arnault wishes to enter the salesroom business that his archrival Francois Pinault embarked upon with his acquisition of Christies in 1998.

What’s now cliché is the notion that anything that so becomes does so because of the large element of universal truth it contains. Such with the nugget of wisdom given voice in this epoch by Mark Twain, to the effect that the older Twain got, the smarter his father seemed. My experience certainly accords with Mark Twain, and so I looked forward to spending Father’s day with my own dad.

As most of my loyal cadre of readers know, my parents, indeed most of my family, are in Fresno, and that is where Sunday took me. As with my own esteem of my father, Fresno continues to grow in estimation. Following our Father’s day brunch, we drove back through the heart of Fresno. It has to be my favorite route, down Van Ness Boulevard from Old Fig Garden to Fresno High, then a jog to the left on Weldon Avenue to Wishon, crossing Olive Avenue to Fulton Street, and all the way to Downtown.

On the one hand, it grieves me to find that so much of the commercial development of the central corridor has languished over the course of the last 50 years. The art moderne monument that is the Tower Theater sadly now no longer contains the Daily Planet, the astonishingly kicky bar and restaurant that the late Hannah Benson made a neighborhood mainstay for nearly 30 years. What a tragedy! With interiors by designer Gary Steinert, it articulated perfectly with the space it occupied. Its back wall in the bar area was dominated by Steinert painted nude women of sinuous mien in the manner of a Lalique vase. A nod to the era when Keith and I were Planet habitués, we invariably referred to them as the nudes on ‘ludes. Not that I had any more experience with Quaaludes than repeating that phrase…it’s something somebody told me about. Honestly, though, with Hannah’s well-stocked bar, we had plenty of opportunities to, shall we say, misbehave. Some two decades ago, on an evening a day or two in advance of a planned trip to London, Keith and I, along with our traveling companion who shall remain anonymous, were revving up prior to departure. Our friend took a shine to a comely new server and, doubtless given impetus from the many healing waters on offer, asked the young man if he would like to go to London with us. Surprised more than shocked, he declined. The redoubtable Hannah got wind of this, and told the young man that he was making the mistake of his life. Well, possibly, but risking a digression, I don’t recall anyone feeling bereft, and the trip itself was cheerful to the point that one’s health was at risk.

On the other hand, it’s pleasing to note that so much of Fresno’s heart survives. A bit further south, beyond where Wishon gives way to Fulton Street, Tokyo Garden, what’s by now a camp classic, is still as popular as it ever was, with a menu that is unchanged since I first went there 40 years ago. Actually, that’s not quite true. Although always with sashimi on offer, a nod was made in the direction of modern cuisine some years back with the introduction of sushi. But I’m somewhat plodding in my own taste, and it’s nice to know that venerable dishes like sukiyaki are still available, and still cooked the same way. A kimono clad waitress will plug in a burner that looks like one of my parents’ wedding presents, and stir fry the fresh ingredients, always including a fair number of straw mushrooms, to toothsome perfection. Although the restaurant has done a jazz night every Thursday for years, the food has nevertheless kept it in front of a younger clientele. If one wants to corroborate this, take a quick look at the reviews on Yelp. That Yelp may be new to you confirms, alas, that you are not yourself ‘younger’. A pleasant surprise surrounding all this is the aggressive building of loft style live/work spaces that presumably respond to modern day yuppies- that seems a tautology, but I was once a yuppie and am now, shall we say, mature- who would rather walk to work and walk to entertainment, and walk to the nearby Fresno Free Market. Not quite so well known as Les Halles, the Fresno Free Market serves the same function, and is nearly as old. My father and I share similar memories of enjoyable Saturday mornings, him in the early 1930’s and me in the early 1960’s, browsing with our mothers the fruit and veg stalls in what was, and still is, an egalitarian and multicultural mecca.

One can divine from all this that Father’s day in Fresno was a pleasant one for me, and I have to say, my father in fatherly fashion is enlarged by his children’s pleasure. This blog entry moved away from what my readers, and me, too, thought it might be, a simple reminiscence about my father, but it, in fact is. Our own fond memories of living in the same town, albeit separated by a generation, indicate not so much shared external experience but a shared internal matrix that can only exist between parents and their children. Fun in and a fondness for Fresno is but one of many reasons I am grateful to my father.

Keith McCullar and I very much enjoy what we do. No question about it, even on a day that is, shall we say, less than remunerative, we are surrounded by beautiful objects and plopped down in the middle of that extraordinary venue that is San Francisco’s Jackson Square.

But you know all that. What you don’t know, and, for the most part, can’t know, are the extraordinary people we’ve had the opportunity to meet through the operation of our galleries. Every hour of every day brings the expectation of yet another wonderful gallery visitor paying us the extreme compliment of, just possibly, wanting to trade with us. One such was the Reverend Peter Gomes, the Harvard divine who sadly passed away a couple of months ago. Although mightily out of the closet for 20 years, he bristled when he heard himself described as a gay minister. His gayness was but one of many elements that defined him, and his outing of himself was in the same spirit of liberation that, a generation earlier, impelled the unassuming person of Rosa Parks to decline to ride in the back of the bus. Nevertheless, June is Gay Pride Month and PBS has just aired a new documentary ‘Out in America’ containing, sadly, Gomes’ last interview. Consequently, Reverend Gomes is much on my mind, so herewith a few recollections.

Not a particularly large person, but once Peter had something to say, which he did fairly early on in his visit, his voice was, in a word, commanding. To say that it was affected is inaccurate- ‘inflected’ might be nearer the mark, as everything was said with precision, and with a cadence and decibel level that, even in conversation, one might assume that his remarks were, out of habit, more usually addressed to a larger audience. As his particular choice amongst our stock at the time was a pair of Regency era portraits of an Anglican clergyman and his wife, of course he told us fairly extensively of his background and interests. I wish I could recount some particular bon mot, but can’t-  what I can say is that the way he said whatever it was was mellifluously impressive.  What does occur to me is that Peter’s voice and manner of expression accorded with his deportment and manner of dress. A tweed jacket with a pocket square, a French blue shirt and gray trousers- but these were all probably signature features, with my memory possibly in this regard enhanced by seeing many, many subsequent images of Peter on TV similarly dressed.

Keith recalls him as kindly and pastoral, and it must be remembered that Peter served a congregation to the end of his life. But our overarching sense even in our brief association was of a man with what Wayne Dyer terms ‘big dharma’- a larger than life person with concomitantly larger than usual responsibilities to fulfill. That Peter was aware of this, too, is abundantly clear in his final words in ‘Out in America’. ‘I am doing’, he said, ‘what God has called me to do, and I think I’m doing it reasonably well.’

We thought so, too.