Telling History

Fellow appraiser Rosalie Wardell sent me an interesting article from the New Yorker. The New Yorker art looks at the Antiques Roadshow and how it has inspired other shows on collecting, value and history. The article notes that it is interesting as many viewers are not necessarily collectors, but the show are successful as they detail cultural property history.

The New Yorker reports

"Antiques Roadshow” premièred, on public television, in 1997. The premise of the program is terrifically simple. Regular folks present a relic—usually excavated from some unswept corner of the home—to a specialist, who then delivers a swift and unsentimental appraisal. By the start of its second season, “Antiques Roadshow” was the most watched prime-time series on PBS. The show has lasted for more than two decades in part because it perpetuates a seductive mythology—that we’re all sitting on gold mines and we simply don’t know it. It also affirms a very American belief in the enduring value of stuff. In the course of a three- or four-minute segment, a benign heirloom is imbued with vast historical and financial worth, and an ordinary person becomes the keeper of an extraordinary artifact.

Earlier this fall, PBS aired a two-part special episode of “Antiques Roadshow” titled “Our 50 States,” in which it recapped notable discoveries from across the nation. In Alabama, a granddaughter of Tay Hohoff, the editor of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” excitedly presented a signed first edition of the book. Ken Gloss, of the Brattle Book Shop, in Boston, valued it at twelve to fifteen thousand dollars. “Be still, my heart!” its owner proclaimed. In California, a woman brought in two carved artifacts—a ladle and a grease bowl, both fashioned from the boiled horn of a mountain sheep—that she had inherited from her great-great-grandfather, a colonel who had spent time near Sitka, Alaska, in the spring of 1877, and had received them from the native Tlingit.

“These are clan figures,” Ted Trotta, a tribal-art specialist, explained. “They are empowered. They’re spiritual. It’s an animistic religion that the native peoples practice—everything has a spirit.” Everything also has a price: Trotta estimated the value of the bowl alone at up to two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

“Antiques Roadshow” eventually inspired an avalanche of similar programs, and its influence seems to have reached a kind of apex recently, with series such as “Market Warriors,” “Oddities,” “Storage Wars,” “America’s Lost Treasures,” and “Picker Sisters”—there are more and more each year—in which curios and keepsakes are assessed.

These programs persist—and often succeed—despite mounting evidence that younger people are uninterested in amassing domestic effects. For many millennials, products are considered inferior to services. This makes sense, given the sorts of objects that now animate and enable contemporary life. Who could ever cherish a smartphone, knowing that its obsolescence is part of its marketing plan? Why assemble a library when you can simply download a book onto your tablet?

Yet there is a mortality-defying pleasure in watching material objects survive. “Pawn Stars,” on the History Channel, documents the World Famous Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, a family-run, twenty-four-hour pawnshop in Las Vegas; the show’s fourteenth season aired earlier this year. At the start of each episode, a customer expectantly deposits an item on the store’s glass countertop. One of the owners, Rick Harrison, typically receives it with narrowed eyes and a dubious “O.K.?”

Some sellers are handily dismissed, though others turn out to be bearing remarkable cargo. In one episode, a man wanders in with a 1961 Gibson SG Les Paul custom guitar, formerly owned and played by Paul’s wife, the singer and guitarist Mary Ford. “This is history, dude,” Jesse Amoroso, the owner of Cowtown Guitars, tells Harrison, after completing his appraisal. The drama of “Pawn Stars” is in the subsequent negotiation. The seller of the Gibson asks Harrison for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars; Harrison counters with seventy-five thousand. (In the end, the guitar changes hands for ninety thousand dollars.)

It is nearly impossible for a viewer not to immediately begin fantasizing about the recesses of her own closet: What have I got, and what is it worth? Many of the pieces featured on the show were passed down to their owners by relatives; “Pawn Stars” inadvertently endorses the idea that tremendous wealth is, in fact, everyone’s birthright.

On “American Pickers,” also on the History Channel, Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, two antique buyers from eastern Iowa, zoom around the country in a white van, knocking on doors and amiably persuading whoever answers to let them scour their property for noteworthy items. Wolfe and Fritz are hunting for what they refer to as “rusty gold”—discarded or overlooked thingamajigs that they can sell to collectors. They clamber over shifting heaps of junk, flashlights held in their teeth. Their mission recalls the plot of “Parson’s Pleasure,” a short story by Roald Dahl, published in Esquire in 1958. Its protagonist, Cyril Boggis, roams the English countryside, looking for antiques to resell for two or three times what he pays. His ambitions are ultimately his undoing—unscrupulous profiteering, the story suggests, is a punishable sin.

Yet profit is not the only goal of “American Pickers.” The antiques market is famously volatile—unlike, say, a bar of gold or a pickup truck, items with no set market value or practical utility aren’t always easy to offload. (It takes a particular kind of person to invest in a tattered sideshow banner featuring a monkey wrestling an anaconda—which Wolfe and Fritz once disinterred from an abandoned amusement park in Forks Township, Pennsylvania, and later sold.) The pickers have loftier ambitions. “We make a living telling the history of America, one piece at a time,” Wolfe says over the opening credits. The implication is that this history is somehow endangered—that we are losing touch with non-virtual objects, and, by extension, with an older, more tactile way of doing things.

It’s fascinating to catalogue the pieces that outlive their immediate usefulness: vintage Levi’s jeans; industrial light fixtures; old bicycles; Airstream trailers; flat-billed wool baseball caps; oilcans; porcelain advertising signs. Though the pickers often sell their finds to interior designers (who might install a trio of artfully corroded pitchforks on the wall of a farm-to-table restaurant), much of what they uncover in barns and outbuildings was once utilitarian. When these pieces are repurposed as decorative, the hope is that they might still broadcast something about their new owner’s authenticity—about the value they place (or wish to place) on simplicity and hard work.

Wolfe and Fritz, like the cast of “Pawn Stars” and the appraisers of “Antiques Roadshow,” coax personal stories out of the people they’re buying from. Doing so allows them to draft a parallel history: there’s the tale of the thing, and then the tale of how the thing ended up in an outhouse in Kansas. Wolfe, especially, understands that meaningful narrative is its own kind of gold, and he emphasizes the autobiographical significance of each item he purchases. He is always sympathetic to sentimental value—what these pieces evoke, and what they mean to their owners.

Sometimes he and Fritz seem more like amateur ethnographers than like businessmen. On a recent episode, Wolfe bought a fixed-gear tandem bicycle from a man in Takoma Park, Maryland, whose mom used to ride it. (Wolfe paid three hundred and seventy-five dollars for it.) Wolfe expressed satisfaction with the price (he thought he could resell it for a small profit), but also with having resurrected an object that had meaning—a lineage that could now be extended. “There’s a little bit of room on the back end, but what I want to do is push that story forward,” he said to the camera. “This is from a family.”

Mostly, these shows capitalize on nostalgia, and the heady desire to exist in any moment that is not ours. “Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory,” the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin wrote, in 1931. Collecting and ordering becomes a sense-making process—a way of understanding and decoding the passage of time, or, perhaps, even reversing it for a moment, protecting the self against encroaching modernity. When an object is taken out of the garage and given a new life, it allows us to believe in the eternal worth of everything. 

Source: The New Yorker