Roadshow and Appraisal Clinics

Fellow appraiser Stephen Sweeting, ASA commented on the Bonhams and Butterfield appraisal clinic post of yesterday and the effects on the personal property profession. He mentioned a short while ago publishing an article in the ASA Personal Property Journal (Spring/Summer 2007) about the Roadshow and its relationship to popular culture. I had read it previously, but Stephen was kind enough to send a link where the scholarly article is online for all AW Blog followers to read and enjoy.

To read the full article, Popular Culture's Claim of the Antiques Roadshow by Stephen Sweeting, ASA, click HERE.

From Stephen's abstract Descended directly from the original British Antiques Roadshow, the American version of the program has the unique status of being PBS’s most successful and popular series with over 10 million viewers each week. Americanized for local consumption and articulated with capitalist ideology, it retains many of the elitist notions contained in the original British series. These can be viewed as a remnant of the elitist Culture and Civilization tradition with its goal of educating the masses and raising the standard of public taste.

Using a structuralist overview, this paper argues that the key to the Antiques Roadshow’s popularity resides in its ambiguous, polysemic quality – a quality caused by semiotic excesses “leaking” from and to the text, and allowing the program to be understood and consumed in a negotiated way without completely abandoning the preferred Culture and Civilization reading. Read as both a type of game show and a knowledge-based form of treasure hunting, these alternative readings serve to lay some degree of popular claim to a program defined by an elitist paradigm.