In My Opinion
John Fiske

“Excess is out of fashion”

I’ve been browsing the media fairly intently, looking for changes in our culture and how they might affect antiques. Two of the trends I’ve spotted give me some cause for hope.

Nostalgia
Professional productions of Our Town have doubled in the last few years – major revivals are currently filling theaters in New York and Chicago. Thornton Wilder’s play, written 71 years ago, paints a nostalgic portrait of small town America as we love to think of it. Nostalgic rather than realistic, but it’s sure ringing our bells right now.

Nick Hahn, a New York marketing consultant, is quoted in a recent Business Week (4/13/09), “Placing the product in the past is comforting to consumers, it grounds them in a time when things were better.” Note that definition of the past, “a time when things were better.” Dunkin Donuts, Eight O’Clock Coffee and Bumble Bee Tuna, to name but a few, are all running so-called “nostalgia campaigns.”

Hey, we don’t need to “place our product in the past,” it’s there already. Antiques are, by nature, “grounded in a time when things were better.” Our town, not just the play but the figure in our imaginations, is furnished with antiques.

The return to nostalgia is a sign that we’re looking in the past for something that we can’t find in the present. Nostalgia, of course, is not a historian’s view of the past, it’s a past seen from the perspective of loss. Nostalgia finds in the past what we have lost in the present. What we have lost, in our current present, are our town times when things were honest, straightforward, simple and trustworthy. That’s the sort of “better” that people are looking for.

So when you’re selling that country table, forget about its original surface and handmade nails, call it an honest piece of country furniture made when they made things properly, and thump it hard to demonstrate its sturdiness. Conjure up the farming family sitting around it, relaxing after a day’s work when they actually produced something that society needed: they didn’t conjure up “assets” out of thin air and a computer program.

Point out how many generations of tired bodies have entrusted their weight to the Windsor chairs around it: Bernie Madoff never sat here. If she buys this table, she knows what she’s getting; she puts her money into it and she knows where it is. Invite her to sit quietly at the table and ask her how she feels. If she feels good, and she will, you’re half way to the sale.

Nostalgia turns to antiques to find what is lacking in the present. In this, it contradicts the received wisdom of contemporary interior design (is it possible to use “wisdom” and “interior design” in the same sentence?) The mantra of eclecticism teaches that everything fits together, provided that it looks right together: it’s a surface-only view of furnishings from which the past has been erased. That view has always diminished the power of antiques in our homes, and it’s particularly irrelevant today. People want an antique not because it fits in soooo harmoniously with modern life, but because it contradicts it. Antiques shine in their difference from everything else that surrounds us.

One of the structural principles of great art is that it holds in balance the tension between opposites. Second-rate art is where everything is sweetly harmonious; it’s sentimental art, eye-candy, wallpaper music; it’s a room designed for its looks, not a room lived in by someone who’s spent the day in a computer cubicle and wants to be reassured that that is not all that life has to offer. We’re all too aware of the tension in our life; antiques provide a balance that can help resolve that tension. They’re art, not wallpaper; they’re art, not design.

No more excess
The other trend expands on a quality already found in nostalgia. In a recent roundtable discussion and call-in on NPR, gurus speculated on what Americans would want when we emerge from the recession. The consensus was that our wants would be smaller and simpler. Our imaginations and desires would be downsized – smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller meals. One of the experts had been interviewing wealthy people and the consensus, she reported, was that they intended to spend less on things (though not, incidentally, on services such as restaurants or vacations). The appeal of less, the gurus decided, lay not in the economy, but in a cultural change: we’d be able to afford more, but we’d actually want less. One of them quoted President Barack Obama as saying, “Excess is out of fashion.” I don’t know if he actually did say that, but I sure hope so.

A couple of hours after listening to this radio program I read a quote from Dolly Lenz, a real estate broker in New York, “For the last three years,” she said, “it was the bigger the better. Now the key words are smaller, livable and affordable.”

Small is beautiful. Buying fewer things is better. Doesn’t that seem bad for the antiques business? Not when you put it in context, in fact, just the opposite. Antiques fit better into a smaller, simpler lifestyle.

The culture that caused our current problems was the culture of excess, summed up neatly in the bumper sticker, “He who has the most toys wins.” This culture pushed us into believing that we would find satisfaction in the accumulation of quantity, not in the selection of quality. In the culture of demented capitalism, excess replaced taste. The hedge fund manager who paid $8 million for Damien Hirst’s dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde had no taste, only excessive “assets.” Robert Allen Stanford, of Texas, used some of his magic money to build a castle complete with moat, pub and manmade cliff. And then he got bored with it and tore it all down. “The once-lionized lifestyles of the rich and infamous were appallingly tacky.”

(Frank Rich, NYT 3/8/09) Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh, money managers whose alleged $667 million fraud looted the endowments at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, paid $80,000 for a teddy bear. Now, teddy bears are wonderful nostalgibles, but at that price they’re part of the culture of excess, not of nostalgia. When the only thing great is the price, you know you’re in the culture of excess.

Less is better
There are two ways of filling our interior spaces, and by that phrase I mean both the rooms we live in and our imaginations. We can accumulate lots and lots of things so the room becomes so full of things that not one of them stands out, or we can have fewer objects with empty space around them. We can line a wall with pieces of furniture and fill the space above them with multiple paintings and objets d’art, or we can fill it with one piece of furniture and one painting. Selection not accumulation. [As an aside here, note that Our Town is performed on a bare stage: no things, just people.] Accumulation needs money, selection needs taste.

The Met’s Period Rooms, incidentally, show a similar swing of the pendulum as the style of the robber-baron era gave way to the spare, tasteful, livable space of the Frank Lloyd Wright house.

For something to occupy on its own a space that had previously been cluttered, it has to speak out for itself, and what speaks out more clearly than a great antique? The aesthetic of less is better, which the gurus think we’re adopting, actually favors antiques, because for the less to be better, it has to be great. A dead shark and a stuffed teddy bear can never be great: they can be disgusting and astounding, or charming and loveable, but not great. A real antique, however, can. But to appreciate its greatness, you have to look at the object itself, not its price: taste, not money. And you know something else? Taste is recession-proof; it hasn’t evaporated.
The “livability” that Dolly Lenz says people now crave is also inherent in the very nature of an antique. We all know the importance of patina, and what is patina but the history of use in the home? Patina is unarguable evidence of livability. But it takes taste to appreciate it.

In this dawning era of injured capitalism, then, taste will be once again where it belongs – in the driving seat of the antiques business. We Americans will downsize our desires in the confidence that less really is better. And that “better” will have strong links to the past. Taste, better, livable, less, the past – stir that little lot together and the only thing you can come up with is an antique. Now, isn’t that something to look forward to?