The eBay Collector as Artist

Antique country objects by their hand-made, individualized nature, are an art form. Like artwork, they’re sought after for their aesthetic value, their representational meaning, and their ability to please in their infinite variety.

They are one-of-a-kind pieces particular and special to their era, inhabiting a unique time and way of life.  In the case of American country antiques, they were usually utilitarian, made to be functional in an agrarian society. Our oldest country, primitive pieces come from New England. These objects, when we encounter them, stand in stark contrast to the numbing homogeneity of the mass-produced present.  They act as a kind of 19th century balm for the aesthetic toxic poisons of the late 20th century and the early 21st.  This is their first level of attraction for us.

For many, these country antiques also serve as a reality check. They tell us things happened in the past. They show us what went before. They are markers along a path, representing permanence as well as change, and above all, they provide a way for transitions to be recognized. In effect, they tell us there will be a future by reassuring us of a past.

But why does the past matter? It matters because it tells us that things do change, and it helps us imagine what might be.  It becomes a rich source of ideas about how our present could be adapted, reinvented, transformed.

Sometimes we may get trapped in the present because we can’t imagine the future. If we don’t have a sense of ourselves along a continuum, we are less likely to envision how things are sustained, or how they are altered and finally, how they change. Antique objects help place us on that continuum.

They also remind us that the future can, like the past, contain elegance, beauty, simplicity, quality and excellence. If these things existed then, they can exist now. These are some of the more tangible attractions. There are others as well.

When we respond to an antique object, we are, in a sense, reaching for a story and the power that the object exudes by virtue of its story. Every 18th and 19th century piece—furniture, quilt, rug, box, wrought iron piece, stoneware jug—comes with a story—maybe two stories.  The first is its historical-use story, the one that tells us about the time period it was made and what it was meant to do.  It calls up visions of what people before us did with those pieces, and it connects us to them through the objects they made and used.  It may still be possible to use the pieces as they were originally meant to be used, and in so doing, connect their old story with our own new “story” and thereby make a second story for the next set of users.

But even disembodied from their practical historical uses, antiques have their own special power by virtue of being what they are.  When we come in contact with an object—a beautiful, simple, well-made object—whose lines are grace and beauty and whose reflected light touches our spirits, we say that the piece has “power.”  By virtue of its gracefulness, its wear, its patina, texture or color, it attracts us, touching us and reminding us how ephemeral such feelings can be, and how, when we have them, we long for more.  It evokes our sense of “rightness” and it pleases. It is instinctive. We reach for it as we would reach for food after great hunger, or the outdoors after confinement from a long illness. 

But perhaps its greatest power may be the sense of mystery it evokes within us.  With a distance of say, 200 years between its time and ours, we must invent or re-invent its many lives.  What has been its fate all these years?  Where has it lived? And with whom? 

Whose hands have held it or used it, discarded or acquired it through ten generations? 

What would it tell us if it could speak?  

We are in its presence as one is in the presence of some ancient force, a force that carries the human vibrations of all who have touched it, and all who have been touched by it. It has its very own life drama that present-day owners must invent and reinvent. Its true secrets can never be fully revealed, and the explanations for the riddles of its life must change with each new owner and user. 

This is magic.

Finally, we always find ourselves paying homage to the original makers of this magic, and in the process, discover yet another, more elusive “value” that antiques can have.  This is the sense of community that one gets in their presence.  When we admire a beautiful old piece, we can’t help but think of its maker or makers.  Usually, a simple object was made by someone living in the household that created it originally. Sometimes, the piece was made in a workshop that crafted utilitarian goods needed by farmers or seaman or merchants living in an agrarian society. We wonder about who created the object we see before us, and if made in a workshop, what the workshop might have been like.  Often, a piece will summon up images of artisan communities—craftsman working alone or together—in a purposeful process of work that had a set of shared, common values.

These communities are extant in our lives because they live in the reflection of their work in our imaginations.  Our imaginations keep them alive because we like what their work represented in terms of these shared values: the importance of skilled craftsmanship, a devotion to quality and excellence, the unstated contractual integrity of work and the integration of work with daily living. Perhaps we like their work because such work—and the sense of community from which it comes—is too often missing from the present. 

It is said that a good collector of antiques is an artist.  If, in a person’s search and selection, he or she has exercised taste, discrimination and understanding, that collection takes on a unique aesthetic quality of its own, a quality which focuses and reflects the intangibly rare blessings of beauty and excellence in a world which desperately needs these comforting reminders of humanity's other side.

To select and preserve the blessings is to share them with the future.  This is the guiding principle of thequakerlady on eBay, and in my shop, Spiritus Mundi Antiques. The phrase “spiritus mundi”—meaning ”spirit of the world”—was used by the poet William Yeats in his poem, The Second Coming, to refer to those ancient objects of the world that were preserved and passed down, and still deserve to be held in safekeeping for future generations to use, to care for, and to pass along.

If the ancient things of this world can be preserved and passed along to succeeding generations of seekers, then why not practice the art of gathering every day, honing one's intuitive ability to see and to feel into a way of being, into a practiced act of sharing that one cultivates, grows, saves and ultimately, one day, passes along?