Antiques, Art, Vintage and Collectibles Blog and Research Information Forum
I guess you could say that our family got in the antiques auction business because of drunkenness. Most people would be embarrassed to admit something like that, but not I.
Long before my father ever stood behind the podium with gavel in hand, he was relentlessly dragging me …….
It has been way too long since I posted my last blog. I love to write and hope to do more soon.
On my way to the Randolph Street Market in Chicago, I had left California with a day or two to spare. In taking my time, I thought I would stop at antique stores in little towns along the way. In a number of stops, people were not to crazy about the state of antique sales. However, in one store in Iowa, a man said it was his best year in the last ten. He was selling refinished oak furniture, go figure? I had to look at a calendar at a local store to make sure I had not passed through a time warp, back to 1985. …
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by Martin Willis
For a more recent blog after reading Marilyn’s unknown personal letters, click here.
I recently had a talk with Joe Maddalena on podcast number 80 and he made a very logical statement. Prices are set by the emotional value something stirs in passionate collectors. That being said, I feel it is difficult to set prices on something like Marilyn Monroe’s famous subway vent scene dress coming up in the June 18th auction. It is estimated at $1 million to $2 million dollars. 
I cannot think of a more famous dress one could sell, but how do we know if $1 to $2 million is what it is really worth?
Update: the dress sold for $4.6 million.
Click here for article.
If Marilyn did not die young and was still alive today, she would be 85. If she were acting in her later years when her beauty had faded, would she still be such an icon? An example that comes to mind would be Liz Taylor, yet as iconic as Liz was, we will see Marilyn as the young image forever more. Will there be more like her in the future? James Dean and her make a boat load of money as dead young people.
My personal opinion is, if we took a 25-year-old Liz Taylor and a 25 year old Marilyn Monroe, Liz is right there on the hot meter. Yet we watched Liz age. I would say that I may have gotten a bit off track here. The point is, there is some Liz Taylor pieces coming up at auction and I am sure they will do very well. However, I do not believe her pieces will have the staying power that Marilyn Monroe’s will have in the future. This is only an opinion here, please don’t send hate mail.
I had a meeting in Carmel with a woman who interviewed me about the auction business several years ago and all of a sudden in the middle of her questioning she said, “your values of things are so subjective, they only have perceived value it seems.” How could I argue with her? I simply said that artwork is easy to track as auction records, but that always changes. The only thing I could assure her was that cataloging in the auction business, estimates are guesses based on what we have seen similar pieces sell for. Three important things are the basis of auction estimates: Rarity, condition and demand.
Never in my life at auctions have I seen prices that make common sense go out the door as they are these days. I wish I could make sense of it all. I believe estimates that are conservative make the piece much more intriguing and help it sell the best. When you post your estimates too high, you scare away potential bidders that would have driven the price up to the right level.
When Darren Julien told me that his $360,000 Michael Jordan & Michael Jackson signed basketball was estimated at $400-$600 it is an example that estimates do not mean a whole lot. This is another case of emotions behind the bidding.
If we do not have an emotional attachment to what we collect, then why bother collecting? It is not a good idea to collect anything as an investment and it is so plain to see as we have been on a roller coaster of prices in the market for years, especially the last few. Fortunes have been lost and some gained. Period American furniture is all but forgotten and that is something I thought I would never live to see.
The basis of this blog today was to explore how emotional values affect the prices at auction. This does not mean the thought process goes out the window, it just means that the more emotions involved and shared by the potential bidders for a desired piece, the stronger the battle is to own it.
You yourself may get carried away at an auction as I have many times. I seem to get invested in the piece I want the higher I bid on it. There is a saying I use for humor at benefit auctions: “The more you pay for it, the more you will like it” In reality the more you like it, the more you will pay.
Thank you for reading and by the way, dying young is not recommended, no matter what the pay scale is.
Martin
by Martin Willis
One of the genesis of starting the podcast is I thought there were so many stories to tell in the business. There are so many things that happen behind the scenes that no one could imagine.
Some of the stories are not so much on the entertaining level as they are on the scandalous level. So I thought I would tell a little of both.
By Martin Willis
There has always been controversy on when someone should refinish on old piece of furniture and when they should leave it be.
I did antique restoration and the refinishing of mostly oak back in the “golden oak“ days. My opinion always was, if it is not a period piece, and it is machine made, then it does not matter if it is refinished or not. That was many years ago and I have not touched sandpaper to wood for a long time. In hindsight my thoughts about refinishing were rather narrow-minded. Just because something is machine made does not mean it cannot be or cannot become important. A hundred years from now, someone may be cursing me for all the refinishing I have done, so I will apologize now in advance.
Luckily, no one ever asked me to refinish a nice arts & crafts piece, however it does seem like the majority of these pieces are not in original finish.
I had a restoration shop when I was in my early 20s for about ten years. I bought a plain oak lamp table at my father’s auction for $10 for display purposes. It had a horrible water stained top and the finish was flaking off. I sawed it in half, refinished one side of it and braced it back together. I put this piece in my showroom so I could display the before an after of my work which was night and day. Not long after the table appeared a crusty old New Englander came in my showroom and started yelling at me for sawing the beautiful table in half. I simply pointed at the original condition side and asked him what he would pay for the table if it looked like that.
Original surface is a big deal on period furniture and I would strongly suggest to my clients that they not refinish period pieces. My best friend’s wife asked me to refinish a period Boston Chippendale desk they inherited in original finish. She was complaining that the finish was dry and crusty (just like the purists like it). I refused to touch it and told her there were other options, unfortunately she went to the phone book and someone else did the deed to my dismay. It was a horrible polyurethane job, shiny as can be and rough to the touch. There were orbital sander marks covering the whole piece.
If you just cannot live with a finish the way it is on a period piece, then you can have it French polished. French polishing is done with a finish amalgamator that is basically blending the finish into itself and then finally rubbed down with pumice. It creates a beautiful luster finish out of the original that is soft to the touch. It takes a lot of time and patience to do the job correctly. A person who is skilled at this procedure can be in high demand. For instance, I was in a 
home of a collector with beautiful period pieces, all of which were wonderfully French polished. I had a piece in mind that I wanted to have done and I asked her who did her polishing. She thought for a minute and said that she was sorry, she could not tell me. When I asked her why, she said that she did not want him to have too much work otherwise, she would have to wait too long to get her work done. As you can guess, she is a hardcore collector. While I am on this subject, I have an upcoming podcast with a very skilled restorer so named Tony Cardona. We will touch on that subject among other facets of restoration.
I still say there is a time when to refinish something and here are my humble opinions. 1. If a piece is painted that was originally finished. 2. If the finish is flaking off down to bare wood. 3. If there is water damage and the finish is totally destroyed.
Contemporary durable finishes seem tempting, but you should only use the type of finish that was originally used on the piece when it was made. That can easily be researched online these days. You can use orange shellac for 18th century pieces, just remember, it does not hold up to water.
Now let’s touch on painted surfaces of period pieces. Nothing is more desirable to a collector then an untouched original painted surface. I saw a situation at auction with a pair of fine chest on chests, one in original mustard color paint and the other stripped and refinished. The mustard color one sold in the six figures because of the remarkable surface. The twin that had been refinished sold for under $20,000. I ask of anyone reading this, if it is period pieces in original painted surface do not touch it with anything. If you think it is dark, or you would rather see it refinished and shiny, do the collecting world a favor and sell it to someone that appreciates it just the way it is.
If you are going to have a piece worked on, I would suggest taking it to someone that has a great reputation among antique dealers. You do not want a period Boston desk refinished in polyurethane.
As a former refinisher, I can tell you that there is nothing like a nice original finish on a great piece. Now I am finished talking about finishes, thank you for reading!
by Martin Willis
Back around 1983, I was working with my father at his auction gallery in Eliot, Maine. It was a small, regional auction house called Seaboard Auction Gallery. We had auctions every few weeks on Thursday evenings. There was always a huge crowd of buyers and it was a nice social event. We were one of the few auction galleries operating in the area at that time, and our consignments came from local estates and homes. The phone always rang and we had our hands full. Now, the seacoast area is inundated with auctioneers and the pie is sliced rather thin these days.