Keep that old knickknack it may be a pricey antique

By Sie Yoe Lien

UTRECHT, The Netherlands (JP): What transforms old pieces of furniture, often scratched or discarded by their original owners, intocostly possessions in fashionable households?

It could only be that increasingly popular and chic pastime of antique hunting, which has conquered city dwellers worldwide in recent decades.

But how many among the millions of antique chasers are sufficiently knowledgeable in separating the wheat from the chafe? And out of the fraction who come home with the real thing, how many are able to care for the objects properly?

Aside from all that, why the craze for collecting old stuff in the first place?

The summer exhibition "Don't touch, it's antique!" at the National Museum van Speelklok tot Pierement here, which ended late last month, attempted to shed some light on the phenomenon of antique collecting.

"We got so many questions from the general public about antiques that we decided to answer these questions by means of one exhibition," museum director Huub Blankenberg told The Jakarta Post.

And the exhibition definitely tried to provide some answers. The first lounge displayed furniture sets from Western Europe's stylistic highlights, starting from the 15th century. The adjacent room contained a hodgepodge of different items, from ivory statuettes to buttons, which begged the visitor to stretch their imaginations about what could be categorized as antique.

While at first glance the furniture room looked like a conventional museum display, it actually contained interactive tricks which invited the visitor to be alert rather than just stroll through.

The cubicles in the first room show typical living rooms from Europe's time periods: the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Art Nouveau.

Information for each display included a brief historical explanation of the period and tips on recognizing furniture from that era. One caption explained that the 18th century Rococo style (sometimes referred to as Louis XV) has a lighter, more fluid and asymmetrical design compared to the heavily ornate Baroque style, with its curls, columns and lacquered finish.

Typical Baroque pieces, the museum explained, would be large mirrors with intricately carved wooden frames, or lacquered cabinets standing proud on sturdy, curly feet.

In each display, one or two items were given numbers, and the curious visitor would have to guess which ones were the real thing, and which ones were made in the 1990s. To the naked eye of an amateur, it would be hard to discern that, for example, the beautiful mirror among chairs and cabinets worth tens of thousands of guilders was made several years ago, with a value of no more than 50 guilders.

"It helps if you know that Japanese porcelain has a greenish color, while its Chinese counterpart has a grayish tint," said Jan Pieter Glerum, owner of the Glerum Auction House based in The Hague, as quoted by the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad.

Touch

In a corner of the same room, visitors were introduced to different types of wood from which most of the costly furniture was mold. More interestingly, the display showed several items which could destroy, or severely damage, the wood.

The wood culprits ranged from different kinds of woodworms -- put in glass compartments so that people could actually view pieces of wood being snacked on by the beasts -- to everyday tools like wax, ink and knives.

The display quaintly showed the surface of a table, stained with coffee mug rings, pen marks and imprints of steam irons.

Does this mean that one should put a precious antique in a corner, roped in so that nothing can harm it?

Museum official Mirjam Blott pointed out that people could only acquire knowledge about the precious things through a lot of contact, hence the paradoxical title of the exhibition.

"How does it smell, how does it feel? Touch it. Look at the bottom of that chair: if everything is stapled together, it can't be antique," Blott was quoted as saying by NRC Handelsblad.

Some of the visitors agreed, including in using the objects after they were bought.

"I believe in using the antiques I buy as they should be, as part of my household," said doctor Dirk Toom, a visitor to the museum and a longtime antique junkie.

Toom said that the cabinets, chairs and statuettes he had bought throughout his life at thrift stores and auctions had to be functional.

"Displaying them out of context is the worst thing you can do. What is the point?" the doctor said, adding the he did not worry too much about possible damage that could befall his treasures.

What is antique?

The second room was a mix of textiles, old dolls and statuettes.

The most enjoyable part of the room was a cabinet full of small drawers, each filled with knickknacks such as buttons, fake pearls, bottle corks and old watches. It was both mockery and praise of the typical pack rat, who in the future could possibly be the rich owner of rare items thrown away by most of her peers a long time ago.

As we opened each drawer, there was the unmistakable whiff of old items stored for a long, long time.

"Curiosa or items from grandmother's time, the euphemism for what many people call 'old junk' are now often presented as future antiques," the museum's display explained.

"Currently, items from the 1970s are already pegged as antique candidates. So don't throw away that chrome lamp with it original orange-brown shade," the museum warned.

Global pastime

Why the immense popularity of the sport?

"Antique collecting as we know it now is actually very new, it only really started after the first, and especially the second World War," Blankenberg said.

"Before that, having secondhand things in a home was not proper. One owned antique, but didn't buy it."

The museum explained that antique collecting could be traced back to the 15th century, but was then limited to Europe's rich elite, who collected mostly items from the Roman and Greek periods. These collectors then put their treasures in glass display cases, the forerunner of today's conventional museums.

However, the 15th century phenomena has little resemblance to today's antique chasing, which involves millions of urban middle classers and hundreds of glossy books, magazines and auction houses marketing things from yesteryear.

The antique boom, Blankenberg said, has also started looking eastward beyond the conventional stops in China, Japan and India. Indonesian goods, he said, are much sought-after.

"In the last five years, the frequency of special auctions of Indonesian art has increased sharply, and I expect that it will keep growing," he said.

"The world has become so small now, and auctioneers are looking at a global market. It has become too small for just European antiques."

Despite the thoroughness of the exhibition, the amateur was still left puzzled about what draws people to tiny shops in Amsterdam's narrow alleys, or to the crowded, dusty streets of Ciputat in South Jakarta.

"Many questions about antiques shall remain unanswered, what we do know is that antiques are fun and exciting to deal with," the museum tells departing visitors.

But another side of the fun coin was found in the exhibition's comment book.

"After coming back from what I thought was a successful sale at the flea market, I asked my boyfriend where my mother's antique vase was," a visitor wrote.

"He sold it for 2.50 guilders (less than US$2) at the market."