It has for years been my sad refrain- the traditional trade, not just in traditional material but its traditions of marketing through bricks and mortar locations in proximity to like dealers and likewise amongst like dealers in the best fairs- that these ways in which to connect with clients new and established were quickly going the way of the dodo bird. For Chappell & McCullar, stalwarts in late years on Jackson Street in San Francisco and innumerable fairs in the US and the UK, we’ve been sadly witness to the death of very many fairs of decades-long tenure, and the complete disappearance of venerable Jackson Square as a venue for fine art and antiques.

And the replacement, I hardly need tell you, is the virtual storefront- even during our waning years on Jackson Square, the lion’s share of our sales were online, and nowadays, virtually all are derived from our virtual presence. We log as diligently our online statistics as we ever did the names, details, and preferences of those visitors who we were pleased to have darken our Jackson Square threshold. A sidebar, though- it shouldn’t surprise me that the business has headed the direction it has. While it has always seemed to me that, though we treat our stock as a fungible commodity- with established criteria for value and quality- clients would forever in the future wish to see, touch and in every way examine at first hand what we had to offer. With all that, from the very first, our gallery visitors always when asked told us that precedent to their visit, they had browsed our website.

So I shouldn’t be surprised that after very many years, the virtual has displaced the actual, and perhaps what I express as surprise is more than slightly inauthentic. What I really am is nostalgic for the old, high touch interaction between object and client and dealer.

I suppose my gentle readers might link the traditional material that is our stock in trade with my fondness for the traditional methods of selling it, but these traditional methods pervade all manner, including the edgiest of contemporary art. One only has to read the art press for a few weeks to discover the vicissitudes experienced by the contemporary art fairs, including the most recent Art Basel. While so many marques- Masterpiece, TEFAF, and Art Basel- continue to try to reinvent themselves to attract buyers, ‘The Canvas’ is reporting something at Art Basel that is astonishing. Contemporary dealer stalwart David Zwirner actually had an online viewing room at his stand offering what the dealer termed a ‘parallel art fair experience.’ Or, put another way, letting a fox into the art fair henhouse. Clearly, Zwirner knew what they were doing, selling items online at the fair into the 7 figures.

Mind you, Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and Gagosian are deep pocketed heavy hitters in the contemporary market, and though for the moment they are committed to not just fairs, but also bricks and mortar in addition to the virtual ‘parallel art fair experience.’ Still, an attachment to traditional methods was fatal to Partridge and Mallett on Bond Street and Kentshire in New York- for decades the most overarching presences within my sphere and now only of blessed memory.

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.