■ antiques WELCOME In My Opinion Aesthetic Pleasure That appalling specimen of humanity called Hermann Goering was, I’m sorry to say, a genuine connoisseur. Plunder is hardly an admirable way of building an art collection, but the collection he built was first class - almost as good as Hitler’s! A Dutch dealer, Han van Megeeren, sold him a Vermeer, and selling a Dutch masterpiece to a Nazi was treason, punishable by death. While in jail, van Megeeren confessed that he, not Vermeer, had painted the artwork, and that he’d sold Goering a forgery. (Sadly, he’d sold his forged “Vermeers” to many other collectors and museums as well.) Goering learned of the forgery while he, too, was in prison, facing execution for crimes against humanity. Apparently he was more distressed by the fact that his beloved Vermeer was a forgery than by his own impending death. He also thought that van Megeeren had done more evil to him than he had to the peoples of Europe. He was a true connoisseur. The Yale development psychologist, Paul Bloom, tells this story in his book, How Pleasure Works, and uses it to illustrate his theory that humans are all, at heart, pleasure seekers in a way that other creatures are not. And to find pleasure, he argues, we are constantly searching for the essence of an object, a person or an experience. Essentialism is, apparently, a hot new branch of psychology, though I’m not sure I needed it to tell me that I’m always looking for pleasure – but then, an awful lot of “science” is common sense in long words. But what lights up the pleasure center in my brain, Bloom tells me, is my sense that I have found the hidden, essential nature of something or someone. This theory explains the deep pleasures we find occasionally in art, music, sex, food and wine and fun. Oh yes, in real antiques, too. Bloom doesn’t mention antiques at all, why are we always the last to the table when Great Things are on the menu? The taste for cheap These ideas were swishing around in the back of my mind as I listened to NPR in my truck. The traffic was heavy, so I missed the name of the woman who was discussing her new book on America’s current obsession with cheapness. To sell anything these days, she said, you need a sign showing the manufacturer’s suggested retail price crossed out, then below that the sale price, also crossed out, and then, finally, in huge red numbers, the lowest possible price. Then it will sell. Now, I’m not going down the “discounting” road again: My column on that topic last month met with far from universal approval. What interested me particularly was her research into IKEA. IKEA, she found, employs 11 designers and scours the world to get the best. It pays them well and gives them everything they need, including high status within the company. But the kicker is that for each design they work on, they are given a (low) cost for which it must be able to be manufactured. IKEA then scours the world for the cheapest possible wood, which it currently finds in the farthermost reaches of eastern Siberia, where logging is uncontrolled and uncontrollable. It then scours the world for the cheapest factories with, of course, the cheapest labor. So – best possible design, cheapest possible materials, cheapest possible manufacture. I couldn’t help thinking of the old, old adage, “If it’s good, it ain’t cheap; if it’s cheap, it ain’t good.” Continued on page 38 Page 12 ■ Antiques Journal ■ September 2010