The New England Antiquing Essay Page

Occasionally in these columns I compare the antiques businesses in the US and the UK arguing that the two track each other fairly closely. This month, it's the differences that have caught my attention.

In Britain the business seems to be emerging from its recent malaise more vigorously than is the case here. I wonder if, in part, this might be attributed to underlying cultural conditions that are very different on each side of the pond. Put simply: Britain recognizes at a national level that culture (contemporary and historical) matters. In America, it is only at the individual and local level that we can see any recognition that that our culture, particularly our history, is a matter of importance. Here, concerned individuals and local groups strive to preserve our history: there, the government and national organizations do, recognizing it as a national good.

1997 is often seen as the birth of Britain's new renaissance. That was when a national lottery was established whose main purpose was to fund culture and the arts. Part of this money provided free entrance to 24 national museums and galleries. As a result, museum visits rose by 53 percent between 1997 and 2007. In America, museums all across the country are suffering from declining attendance and some are n the brink of closure..

Earlier this year, the opposition spokesman in Britain floated the idea that museums should be able to charge for admission if they wished. The backlash was so powerful that he had to withdraw the suggestion almost as soon as it was published. The Brits think that free access to their culture is a right, Americans seem to view it as socialism. Oh dear.

So in New York, adults have to pay $20 each to visit the Met or MoMA, children under 16 are free. In Boston, adults pay slightly less, $17 to enter the MFA, but children have to be under seven to get in for free: between the ages of seven and 17 they are charged $6.50. In London, you can visit the National Gallery, Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum for free, however old you are. More locally, just down the road from our offices, Sturbridge Village charges $20 for adults, and $6 for children aged 3-17. In general, it's $40 - $50 for an American family of four to visit a museum. Pocket change for some families, out of reach for others. And as for regular museum visits - fuggetabahtit!

Education and Culture

The Met admits students in the New York educational system for free. MoMA, however, says that its policy of free admission for children under 16 does not apply to groups, many of which would be school groups. A visit to a museum is rapidly disappearing from the educational experience of our children. I've had conversations with a number of directors of local museums, who are, to a man or woman, deeply worried by steep declines in their admissions. Every one of them, without exception, bemoaned that the sharpest decline of all is in school visits: the feat that we are not cultivating a new generation of museum goers. Do you hear echoes of the worries in the antiques business?

A number of these museum directors attribute this decline directly to educational policies and funding. Schools are being forced, often to the dismay of teachers, to concentrate their resources on teaching only knowledge that can be tested. Tying a schools funding to its performance in tests and teachers' pay to the performance of their students in tests are other big steps in the same direction. Even if schools could spare the time for such an extra-curricular visit, they no longer have the funds.

The effects of a museum visit are not testable. The gradual realization that our past is part of who we are and that it can be fascinating in its own right can never show up on a digital scale of educational achievement. The intake of breath when faced by an object of beauty will never become part of a reportable statistic. Our educational system is no longer geared to producing cultured and cultivated citizens. Consequently, young Americans' idea of culture, which we might define as the life of the imagination, is limited to Hollywood, video games and the music industry. For them, culture is market-based and nothing more: consequently their imagination is the product of the market and nothing more. In their experience of culture, museums don't fit, antiques don't fit.

Now I'm not saying that industrialized culture is in itself a bad thing - how could I when its movies, music and TV have been so important in my own life (though their importance is diminishing rapidly as I get older.) No, it's the degree to which they have monopolized culture that worries me. Think how limited an imagination must be when the only things that stimulate it are electronic. It must be incredibly difficult for a young person in our society today to achieve a balance between a hugely successful, brilliantly marketed, exciting industrial culture, and the quieter, more personal forms of culture such as antiques and art. We need more young people like Antonio (see Talking Point, pXX), who does have a fully-rounded imagination. His family has given him every help and encouragement: at school, however, his imagination seems off-beat and odd. It ought to be held up as a model, but it isn't. That is really, really sad.

The future health of the antiques business, like that of museums, depends upon people whose imaginations are not limited by the one-dimensional culture of the mass market, but are balanced and multi-dimensional. We have no right to bemoan the cultural industries' success in marketing their products - that's their whole raison d'^tre - but we can, and should, complain about the feebleness of our efforts, if any, to promote other forms of culture. We can and should fight to change a general conception that art and antiques are marginal to the well-being of the nation, and that their importance, if any, is limited to those few eccentric individuals who can afford to indulge their odd-ball, elitist and exclusionary tastes.

Organizing
One problem we face is that we have no national organization representing the antiques business as a whole. Our trade associations represent the interests of their members only, not the interests of the business. Stupid, because their members are more directly affected by the state of the business as a whole than by anything their own organization can do on its own. But if an organization did something to benefit the business generally, then, horror of horrors, dealers who are not members might benefit! So we have no-one like LAPADA in Britain who lobbied the Department of Transport to produce an official symbol for road signs pointing to towns and villages where antiques can be found, whether the shops are members of LAPADA or not! (See p. XX) Even if drivers don't turn off to follow them, every sign they see sends the message that antiques are part of national life. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a symbol on all our Interstates that meant "Antiques at the next exit"! Marketing experts say that it takes 27 exposures for a marketing message to take effect. You'd get that in every 500 miles of driving. But who would lobby to get such a thing?

The only evidence I've seen of an organization promoting the interests of the business beyond that of its own members is the campaign that PSMA is currently waging to get fakes out of the antiques marketplace (see pXX and Talking Point in our May issue). Time and again, people cite the fear of being taken in by a fake as one of the reasons they're reluctant to start buying antiques. If we can get rid of this fear, the whole business will benefit, not just the dealers who exhibit at PSMA members'shows.

Forgeting the national level for a moment, is there something we could do at the local? What if a dealer association chartered two buses to bring high school students for a free tour of its annual show? One of its members could lead a seminar on the sort of history that antiques can teach them to set alongside the sort that they learn from books. And do you know, they might, they just might, prefer the sort they can learn from antiques. Even if it's not testable. There may well be more than one Antonio among them, just waiting for the spark that their school experience has been unable to provide.

Might a dealer association sponsor a school prize for the best essay on the history of ordinary life (the sort of history that antiques carry)? Can a dealer association and local museums get together to figure out ways to reach out not just to kids, but to adults, to offer them the chance to experience how their ancestors lived in the hope that it will fire up their imaginations? What would dealers think if part of their membership dues went towards subsidizing admission to a museum and an antique show?

Please, think up ideas and projects, and then tell NEAJ about them. We'll spread the word as best we can. Remember Dave Krashes' project of "Every Collector Add a Collector" (NEAJ July). We've had a gratifying response to our offer of a free subscription for every new buyer who starts collecting antiques as a result of this proposal - and there's a sub card in this issue as well.

I'm sure we can come up with ideas - as a group antique dealers are imaginative and thoughtful. The problem is that we also tend to be individualistic, maverick, and not good at co-operating with our fellows. How many of us got "Does not play well with others" on our report cards? Is that why we've shot ourselves in the foot, and are consequently stumbling helplessly in an age where interest groups and lobbyists dictate policy?

Organizing antiques dealers is like herding cats, but does it have to be?