5 February 2015

Antiques or should we say “The new old”

09 February 2015
An antique (Latin: antiquus; “old”, “ancient”) is an old collectable item. They are bought at antique shops, estate sales, auction houses, online auctions, and other venues, or estate inherited. It is collected or desirable because of its age, beauty, rarity, condition, utility, personal emotional connection, and/or other unique features. It is an object that represents a previous era or time period in human society.

I had a pretty bad case of the flu last week and lucky me it was the week of my birthday and let me be the first to say that there is no shortage of good television on cable TV for the mind filled with Neo citron and Advil cold and flu caplets. The one show however which was able to hold my attention was ‘Storage Wars”. When rent is not paid on a storage locker for three months in California, the contents can be sold by an auctioneer as a single lot of items in the form of a cash-only auction. The show follows professional buyers who purchase the contents based only on a five-minute inspection of what they can see from the door when it is open.

Most of the time depending on the location or town of the specific storage facility the lockers are full of a lot of home furnishing items like furniture and appliances and also collectibles and this is where the money is. It’s like modern day treasure hunting, with each episode I was glued to the television screen in anticipation of what the valuable treasure find would be for that particular episode. While many lockers are full of people’s junk there are equally lockers with items of great value which keeps you watching episode after episode.

The common definition of antique is a collectible object such as a piece of furniture or work of art that has a high value because of its considerable age, yet it does in fact vary depending on the source, product, and year. Antiques are usually objects that show some degree of craftsmanship or a certain attention to design, such as a desk or an early automobile. Motor vehicles are an exception to the 100-year rule. The customary definition of antique requires that an item be at least 100 years old and in original, unaltered condition-which excludes most cars. Therefore, cars are generally considered antique if it is 25 years old or more. (Cars can be registered as “classic” when 20 years old.)

I didn’t however just find one show dedicated to the pursuit of Antiquities but a variety of shows like, “The Antique Road Show, Pickers, Cash and Cary amongst others. It seems that as a society we are looking towards the past for our articles to live with, could it be that as a society we long for sturdier times when things were made by hand and built to last or are we just romanticizing years gone by and hoping to have a little of that quality and workmanship seep into our technologically driven fast lives. Whatever the reason Antiquing is here to stay and it seems to be one of the few ways that we are able to hold on to some of the old values which helped shaped the foundation for the standards and work ethic which we valued so much in the past and still hope for today.

“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley,

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