It seems I have… a hobby? When I wasn’t looking a new trapdoor opened in the panelling of my personality and now I am an auction person. Every Monday I waddle to the auction house at the end of my road, and calmly finger the tchotchkes and platters and tables and prints, choosing which item I don’t need that I need that week. I know it’s a hobby because my boyfriend alternates between disapproval and patronisation, sometimes both, depending on the size of the teapot.
eBay has been my main shopping mall since 2007, because I both love old clothes and enjoy the chase. But the differences between a website and a real auction are vast and grounded largely in touch and smell, and the sense that a real person has curated this weekly museum of loss and memory.
A small chipped vase is thus both elevated and grounded by its position on a table beside an art deco ring and a Polaroid of Diana. I still use eBay and, though I also dabble in online catalogues (last week I absentmindedly bid £10 on a picture, learning after winning that much of the artist’s collection is displayed at the Whitney, thank you), I am very much committed to my local auction house. This was the place my parents bought the furniture I grew up with and, after Ikea failed me through three flats and I was called back to the suburbs, the place I ended up in search of a chest of drawers that would not buckle under the weight of a bra.
A recent house clearance meant one auction was awash with elephants. Elephant paintings, elephant-shaped umbrellas, bottles with trunks, and an elephant rug, and so on. Someone had loved elephants, and then they’d died. His was an acceptable collection. Some months earlier, I walked in to find a number of vivid mannequins, each dressed in bright-red lingerie; on the wall various pieces of erotic art appeared, hungry women hanging alongside the usual watercolours and adorable amateur attempts at hands. Boxes of specialist porn magazines piled comfortably next to the encyclopedias, and on the ceramics table sat a bronze woman grasping her nipples through what appeared to be a wet dress. Though, in bronze, tricky to say. A local man had died the way he lived, surrounded by massive tits. His inner life, shame and sexuality had been priced per piece. Bids started at £5.
Every week I feel fresh pangs at the lack of interest in anything large, or ornate, or mahogany. Family pride in the shape of wardrobes or sideboards stands waxed and varnished like bikini models. But despite the craftsmanship and years of reliable service, they don’t sell – they don’t fit modern lives, they eventually go for £30 a pop. They have a new name, in the interior design world – OBF. Old Brown Furniture. It invites, doesn’t it, a wrinkling of the nose at best, at worst a sort of gag reflex. It’s not just that modern homes don’t have room for these Victorian or Edwardian forests of dovetailed wood, though that’s part of it. It was reported this week that nine out of 10 London house-shares don’t have living rooms, as landlords squeeze the juice out of every square inch. But the real issue is taste, that bulbous un-poppable boil that grows on all our necks, swollen with class anxiety and things your auntie once said at Christmas.
The stage on which we can see the evolution of taste play out is the auction house. According to the New York Times, wealthy people are having trouble selling their homes because they have too many antiques. The new generation of rich people are not reassured, but instead disgusted by OBF, their tastes having been moulded not just by years of picking shot out of pigeon at their parents’ dining table, but by telly. “At a time when home design television shows… emphasise light colours and pared-down interiors, it can be harder to sell homes that are furnished with antiques,” the New York Times reports.
I feel for the couple that bought a “George V game table and chairs” for $10,000 in 2006, selling it today for 90% less. More and more, as I study Succession and Ivanka Trump and Kim Kardashian, I am learning that it is horrible to be wealthy, partly because there is so much further to fall. They look away as the van pulls up, grey blankets shrouding their heirlooms, giving them the look of hungover ghosts.
Which is where I slide in with my greasy debit card, one eye trained on quality, the other on exceptional whimsy. It’s not just about finding something I need, or even finding something I like. It is more base, more basic a need, a feeling that sits quite low, near my bowels. I am no athlete, nor am I particularly bright, competitive or gifted at cards. So I am chasing a moment. When the hammer goes down at the auction, I truly know what it feels like to win.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter@EvaWiseman
