The Young Collector: It's All Relevant (Or at Least It Used to Be)

by Hollie Davis and Andrew Richmond

Forgive us. We're often not sure where we are, or, at least, not sure of where we've been. One of the hazards of so much business travel is that we're constantly trying to remember with whom we had a particular conversation and where we were when we had it. We frequently have to revert to unraveling our memories of an incident and often find ourselves saying, "No, I remember I was cold when we were standing around talking, so we weren't in Nashville," or "You had a tie on—was it an Ohio Historical Decorative Arts Association lecture?" We are, one would think, too young for this, but there you have it.

This is by way of explaining how we had a conversation, which we remember vividly, in a place and time of which we have no memory at all. Hollie is a librarian, and we were discussing with someone, a librarian or an antiques dealer, somewhere, at a library show or an antiques show, about how librarians seem to be going the way of the antiques dealer—slipping into obsolescence or antiquity, losing relevance in the 21st century. This little seed got planted somewhere, and on some stretch of interstate, with one of us driving and the other propping sneakers on the dash, it started to take root.

Libraries have been struggling for quite some time now, battered (and benefited, to be sure), much as the antiques business has been, by the advent of the Internet. Why go to a physical location when ordering cheap things on line is so easy? Why develop a relationship with a trusted source when one can find information on one's own from the comfort of home? Why rely on a local source for materials when national or international sources are accessed just as easily? Any of this sound familiar?

If you check out your local library, you may find that libraries are working hard to reassert their relevance. Historically, they've seen themselves as brick-and-mortar locations offering primarily one kind of product (information) to the people who walk through their doors. Now, they offer on-line catalogs that allow you to request materials in your pajamas at 3 a.m. or chat live with a librarian somewhere who can text or e-mail you suggestions about the insomnia that might have you up at that hour. With our library cards, we can read or listen to thousand of books and never step through the library doors, or if we choose to visit, it may be to attend a free concert or sign up for a yoga class held in the public meeting rooms.

Libraries are on Facebook and Twitter, blogging about their summer reading programs, and e-mailing patrons when new books by their favorite authors are scheduled to arrive. Libraries recognize that they can't be relevant today if they are able to be relevant only to those within the physical walls of their institutions, and they're trying hard to see themselves in a different way, as a community-building organization that has no walls.

"Relevance," by the way, is one of those ridiculous marketing buzzwords that doesn't really say anything any more because it's been used so often (not unlike "think outside the box"). What it translates to is something that isn't considered euphemistic enough to be uttered, so in typical fashion, if someone doesn't think the truth sounds friendly enough, they just come up with another word to sort of muddy the waters a bit. Then they can tell you something that might be a little hurtful without just coming out and saying it. When someone asks you if you're relevant, what he or she is really asking is if and why people care about what you do.

The tricky thing about staying relevant (or of interest to anyone) is that what people care about changes. It changes every day as their lives change; last week, when they had a job, they cared about scheduling a vacation next year, and this week, when they've lost their job, they care about paying their mortgage. It also changes from generation to generation; our parents' generation cared about paying off their homes, and our generation cares about paying off student loans.

Their reasons for caring change too; for instance, both generations have cared about saving money, but over several decades the reason for saving seems to be shifting from having something to pass on to one's children to just saving enough to get through to the end of life without becoming a financial burden. Saving money is still important, but the reason for it has changed, so when financial advisors talk to people about saving, they've made some alterations to their sales pitch in deference to what people care about now.

We hear all the time that people used to care more about antiques, or at least it seems that way, but if you extend that thought, there must be a reason: antiques were relevant 20 years ago in a way they aren't now. Of course, we weren't there, or if we were, we were hanging on to our mothers' pant legs and hoping to get through the morning without touching anything, but we've been asking ourselves, from our perspective, why did people collect antiques a generation or more ago?

It seems to us that much of the relevance was due to fashion and marketing; as much as we like to think of ourselves as independent beings, we're told all day long through myriad sources what we should want, how we should look, and how our homes should look. Country/Americana looks were very fashionable, and decorator magazines, so popular into the 1970's and '80's, were showing people exactly what they should desire-homes filled with primitives and other antiques.

Women's magazines were a key source for interior looks, antiques-oriented or not, and today, many of those same magazines are suffering. The "Seven Sisters" of the magazine world, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Woman's Day, and the now-defunct McCall's, although still posting some of the highest circulation figures in magazine publishing, have, according to the Magazine Publishers of America, seen circulation figures drop from 45 million in 1979 to 26 million in 2008. (Clearly, magazines may be experiencing a relevance issue too.)

Meanwhile, magazines today like Real Simple use antiques, but more sparingly, and they also often advocate repurposing them, often by painting or stenciling, something that the current mindset (and pricing) in the antiques marketplace doesn't even begin to encourage. And, of course, the bicentennial didn't hurt the antiques marketplace of the mid-1970's. American history and the objects related to it got a real boost. While not on the order of the Colonial Revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the bicentennial era did encourage a new interest in preserving and studying our material history.

Today, that's a lot different. America's recent political and economic history has left many young folks feeling a little frustrated. Perhaps even more important, our world has become very current. With 24-hour news coverage, Americans today are far more "in the moment" than ever before. History has become two years ago, not 200 years ago. That's not to say, of course, that antiques have lost their historical relevance, just that the historical aspect of them isn't as relevant to buyers today as it once was.

Speaking of history, let's remember that those were also the days when many women were at home (and men were earning better wages, relative to today, and carrying less debt). For many women, making a home (including furnishing it) was their primary occupation. That's the group responsible for the rise of all those women's magazines-women who were busy at home creating a sense of home by decorating and collecting.

According to many recent articles, because of the recession that has seen more men losing jobs than women, it's suspected, but won't be confirmed for some time yet, that women have crossed over the 50-yard line, making them a majority in the United States workforce. Decorating homes has decreased in relevance. If you doubt that, look at the construction boom—people want to move into houses or, better yet, condos that require very little of them. The walls are beige, the carpet is beige, and they're often that way two or three owners down the line. We don't interact with our homes any longer. (This probably explains a bit of the foreclosure situation. Any lender knows you want someone to be invested, financially and emotionally, in collateral, and we've stopped being either in recent years.)

It's not a large step to see that people also want interiors that require very little of them as well—no furniture they have to be careful with, no objets d'art that require dusting. (Not us, by the way; we flop on our Windsors.) But delicate and dusty is certainly the outsider's perception of antiques, and as one would expect, the market for mid-century modern is humming, because its relevancy is on the rise.

The world we grew up in wasn't only a different world, it was a much smaller world than the one we live in now, the world before the Internet came along and opened up so many doors. (Some of which, arguably, would have been better left shut.)

From the stories we hear, which may be tinged with an understandable level of nostalgia, when Garth's had an auction in 1980, everyone within driving distance who was interested in antiques was there. It was as much a social event as a place to collect. Now, it's getting harder to get people to drive 30 minutes. They're still bidding, bidding like crazy, just not as much in person. Collectors are covering a wider area on line, and dealers are spending less time attending auctions in person.

Let's face it, if you give up more than a third of your weekends each year doing shows, you most likely have other things to do on a Saturday than sit in an uncomfortable seat all day. We certainly do. On the road, we hear grumbling about auction houses, that they're taking a larger and larger share of the marketplace, and that it's difficult to buy "right" at auction these days. There's certainly more competition—if you are at an auction, you're no longer bidding against only the people around you, but against people from around the world.

If people want things quickly and from their laptop at home, auctions have been helping them achieve that and working harder perhaps more than any other segment of the market not only to maintain but to increase relevance, or at least access. Andrew first bid through eBay in a brick-and-mortar auction in 2002 (but he's been buying antiques on line since the mid-1990's) when many other antiques-related businesses didn't even offer Web sites or e-mail, much less on-line shopping. Many of you probably can't imagine buying an antique on line without even touching it, but we do it all the time. Point-and-click shopping has become the cornerstone of the American retail economy.

Clearly, if the growth, success, and even the recent proliferation of auction houses is any indication, relevance pays off. There's really no other explanation-if you're relevant in business, you succeed, and if you aren't, you don't. What we've talked about here are a few of the reasons we think antiques were relevant to previous generations and how that might have changed.

We're sure, especially in light of the fact that we weren't there, that we've missed some of them, so let us hear from you. Send us an e-mail or stop by the blog (www.youngantiquecollectors.com) and tell us why antiques matter to you. Then, tune in next month when we'll talk about the reasons that they could be relevant to future generations. That's the conversation we need to be having if we're hoping to survive as an industry.

We welcome ideas, tips, criticisms, and questions regarding "The Young Collector." Andrew and Hollie may be reached by e-mail <youngcollectors@maineantiquedigest.com>, via our blog (www.youngantiquecollectors.com), or by writing The Young Collector, c/o Maine Antique Digest, PO Box 1429, Waldoboro, ME 04572.

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