I wish we could all appraise class issues like Antiques Roadshow's tweedy experts
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Version 0 of 1. If you’re a regular TV viewer, you’ve probably noticed the incremental dominance of what we might call antique broadcasting. I’m not referring only to Antiques Roadshow, which screens almost every hour, on the hour, across the ABC’s various stations but also the (mostly American) reality programs that posit, improbably, pawn shops and storage auctions as sites of high adventure. Related: I can't bury my hatred for Antiques Roadshow any longer | Jonathan Jones Antique broadcasting always deals with class, a subject usually taboo in Australia. You can see that most obviously in the original, British version of Antiques Roadshow, which builds each episode through a three-part structure, repeatedly positing and then resolving class antagonisms. The sequence begins with the encounter between Antiques Roadshow’s tweedy expert and the ordinary person plucked from the queue to have her heirloom evaluated. That assessment always takes place in a castle or manor or similar grand setting. Thus the Roadshow visitor, anxiously clutching her cracked pot or lump of mud, appears as plebian supplicant, her inferiority accentuated both by the venue and by the patronising tone in which the assessor displays his superior knowledge. The eventual revelation of the (usually) astronomical sum that the artefact might fetch at auction moves us from stage one to stage two – and an immediate reversal of the previous roles. In this second phase, the attendee steps forth not as gawping bumpkin but as a person of means, the possessor of an item of remarkable value. The expert suffers a corresponding diminution. He knows all about the artefact but it’s not actually his. Suddenly, he becomes more of a hired advisor than a social superior. Often the assessor acknowledges the shift in status with a joke: “I’ll keep that!” But it’s the third stage that gives the Antiques Roadshow its distinctive and distinctly old-fashioned charm. For the interaction traditionally culminates with the visitor dismissing the heirloom’s monetary value as irrelevant. “I’ll never sell,” she declares, to the expert’s beaming approval. “It means too much to me.” Each segment thus begins with aristocratic hierarchy before undercutting it with the bourgeois reality that money matters more than birth, title or education. The third act in the drama then provides a reassuring demonstration of the compatibility between the market and older ideals (tradition, family, heritage, etc), nicely resolving the implicit antagonisms of stages one and two. It’s a fantasy, of course (one imagines that, as soon as they’re off camera, most attendees start dialling the auction house to hock granny’s old teapot) but rather a gentle one, particularly when contrasted with other variants of the concept. For instance, the American version of Antiques Roadshow launched in 1997. In translating the show for a US audience, the producers focused much more overtly on antiques as a possibility of self-enrichment. The opening credits show valuables arranging themselves like symbols in a slot machine; a loud ka-ching accompanies the assessor’s valuations. Because the show’s less oriented to national heritage, the three stages of the British concept tend to collapse into one: basically, the revelation about how much the individual piece might be worth. In truth, the American Antique Roadshow feels like a transitional form, a bridge to the newer, reality-style programs that take for granted the marketisation of sentiment. The most prominent example currently screening in Australia is Auction Hunters, a program that chronicles the doings of Allen Haff and his partner Ton Jones, as they bid on abandoned storage units and sell their contents. It’s merely one example of a broader genre that includes Storage Wars, Baggage Battles, Container Wars and a host of similar programs. The aggression in the titles emphasises the pitiless competition that underpins the genre. Haff and Jones are not pipe-smoking academics; instead, they present as a frat boy and a biker respectively. The action takes place not in English country houses but in depressed industrial suburbs, where our heroes bid for the possessions of (one presumes) the recently bankrupted and the newly dead. How does this rather bleak glimpse into the US’s permanently stagnant economy translate into entertainment? In part, we’re shielded from the implications of the conceit, simply because Haff and Jones always win. Every unit contains exotic items for the duo to discover; when they take their treasures to market the buyers obliging tell them just what the finds are worth (which renders the televised haggling that follows rather moot). More importantly, they generally sell to collectors, whose unabashed pleasure in the esoterica with which they’re presented obscures the ruthlessness of the hunt (or the war or whatever). Each episode concludes with Haff and Jones firing antique guns, swinging old swords, driving vintage cars and otherwise frolicking with the items they’ve uncovered, implicitly negating the notion of value existing only in exchange rather than use. In a fantastic 2001 piece for Harper’s Magazine, Joshua Wolf Shenk describes his interaction with the Roadshow phenomenon in America, as he tries to value a Hebrew typewriter owned by his grandfather. He finds the whole process deeply depressing. Haff and Jones fire antique guns and swing swords, negating the notion of value existing only in exchange and not use. “Another reservoir of human life has been injected with the green dye of the market,” he laments. One rather doubts he’d enjoy Auction Hunters. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to note that Antiques Roadshow and Auction Hunters, shows that celebrate the monetisation of supposedly priceless things, must emphasise the non-pecuniary aspects of its characters’ endeavours. In the 14th century, Christians in Spain sang Ad Mortem Festinamus (We rush into death), chorusing: The short life soon will end,death comes faster than you would believe.It destroys everythingand has no mercy,and has no mercy. Antiques serve a similar function: a kind of secular memento mori, reminding us of the passage of time and the inevitability of death. Think of the treasures arrayed for a typical episode of Antiques Roadshow: an exquisite Georgian mirror; a Chinese scholar’s ivory brush pot; a saucer from a nineteenth century tea set; and so on. They’re accessible to Fiona Bruce and her team only because their original users – people who walked and talked as we do now – have gone the way of all flesh, as indeed will the show’s viewers. If that seems a bit grim, antiques also offer an implicit consolation. Medieval Christians contrasted the brevity of our earthly existence with God’s everlasting kingdom. In a secular age, the persistence of an antique provides the next best thing. Merciless death destroys everything – yet a household item provides a tangible reminder of lives that have past. “Objects, sometimes more powerfully than faces, remind us of what was and no longer is,” writes Teju Cole. “[O]bjects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person’s life.” Related: Antiques are about love, not money | Mark Hill That’s Walter Benjamin’s famous point about collecting: that it allows us to establish a relationship through which we can transcend ourselves. “One only has to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case,” Benjamin writes. “As he hold them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as if inspired.” Even in Auction Hunters, there’s a glimpse of that. |