Why our brains can't comprehend how good things are now in design/urgent museum-level auction

An essay on the glut of good furniture that shows up in only parts of the market

Nice weather this week, no housekeeping, straight to the work. Those that want immediate items and auctions should scroll down as some of the goods are time-sensitive (aka ending now).

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I was bullshitting with a couple friends this past weekend about furniture and design, which happens now and then, and how it feels like we’re a couple minutes (months, maybe more) of the point in which the water begins to boil over.

It’s not one thing but several. It’s a very exciting time, I think, for the industry and whoever is in the mix with furniture now. Every six months or so people’s interest in design, and their abilities to invest time in it doubles. New stores aren’t yet opening up, not at a rate of more than here and there, the media avenues are mostly the same… and so nothing can be described… factually. But the bellwether is more younger people (under 35; 35 is young in design) developing deeper opinions about furniture and design, and actually getting pieces for their huts… anecdotally. Furniture isn’t as… forbidding as it once was. It’s ideologically available, and it feels like, to use an analogy I’ve relied on for much of this newsletter, akin to where vintage clothing was a decade ago. It’s bubbling up, almost there, appetites are growing, tastes are being distilled.

The curiosity interacts with the fact that there’s still no seamless network of institutions around design, or any way to get this stuff easily. It’s better now than it was, but it’s still pretty tricky. I spent an earlier column about this:

Snake Essay 003: Why doesn't anybody have good furniture?

And don’t want to repeat myself; the topic today more is… it is hard/maybe impossible to express the degree of the gulf between how barren things are and how different they could be. I’m not sure if there are a dozen good furniture stores in America. Since there is no big institutional network around yet for consumers to buy lots of things for their homes, we might think that’s the way it is now… but on a closer look, once you look around, it looks less empty than it does a blank slate. The space, as judged by consumers’ education and taste levels, is growing, and, I think, massive… but the market itself is yet to be built.

Design is massive, and the more of it you see, eventually, the further the borders appear. I thought about this as I looked through auctions this weekend to find stuff for this week’s Observer. There are always more good items out there than I can fit into a newsletter, even on slow weeks, and I don’t love to repeat myself, so I veer to the novel. But there are some weeks, such as this one, where the glut is just too much to put forward in a reined-in at all way, or to even hint, or to begin to express how much stuff is out there… and instead the whole scope of crap that’s available acts more of as an explanation of the gulf between what is and what could be. To be sure, furniture, now and then, is no secret, and is out in the open and unremarked upon, but only hovered over by freaks and people who work in the design industry. I think this is because there is too much out there to logistically compute.

(Speaking specifically, I count 32 items this week that are as good as anything written about here in the past year. Mostly items from Europe, French and Italian design… some classic and canonical items, some semi-unseen, others, academic, some wild. They are at the bottom of the newsletter if you want to look at them now.)

Seeing this skid of stuff brought up a couple of thoughts. One is that I’ve been too hard on developing design taste through photos. I skimmed through the auction and the photos of these items stopped me in my tracks. It was a real feeling, even though I felt it through the phone or computer. You don’t have to buy these items to receive from them real understanding. This is part of a larger point: It’s not like you have to own something to experience it. I don’t own any Bruegel the Elder paintings; they’re all in museums. But I still like how he does things. I will state that as strong as the feelings are that one gets when one sees a great piece of furniture however they see it, they are deeper and last a lot longer when that furniture is in your hut. (You can look at it longer and contemplate it.) But there’s a lot to be said for just looking.

Two is that the pieces here show that it’s frankly hard to express the gulf between such pieces and what is everywhere else on the market. Not in terms of quality or beauty—that’s another discussion—but in terms of variety, novelty and excitement. Could there be so much stuff out there now that we don’t know about? Is it even that much deeper and more varied and hard to describe, explain with schools and jargon? I’d say so. It reminds me of this thing Dr. Marion Nestle (communist food professor) said in an interview I did with her but which I didn’t publish:

“One of my former doctoral student did an experiment in one of her Nutrition One classes where she asked the class to tell her how many calories they were in an 8 oz soda, and how many calories there were in a 64 oz soda. A simple mathematical problem. A multiple of eight. The average multiplier was three—[they thought the 64 oz soda had three times the calories]. Those students aren’t mathematically challenged, but they told her that the calories in the big soda was impossible.”

I love this story. My reading of the results in the experiment that Nestle pointed out is that… sometimes the gulf is so big we can’t get our heads around it. It’s crazy to think that a Big Gulp might have like 2,400 calories or what have you… it’s tough, for someone just wrapping their head around what’s out there in design proper, and gelling that with what is available to consumers and workers with what’s actually been put out in the world and has been made. The more things there are, the less context there is. It’s not that it’s overwhelming, it’s just too much information out there that can stick in one go-round.

The third thing… let me change the subject a little, with a story. I remember signing up for eBay a couple of decades ago, when I was in college, before they bought Paypal, ages ago. Things were very cheap. But at the time things were regularly priced. We didn’t see into the future. But I felt at the time, when I dug around, that there was too much stuff. So I didn’t buy everything. This anecdotal perception was confirmed in this past week’s interview:

with my friend Ryan, who is Italian, and who mentioned, off-hand, that he regretted not buying more hardcore shirts a decade ago on the platform when they were incredibly cheap and pretty plentiful. All collectible markets are mostly alike. And looking back, we’re in the same era now. But we always have been. When I signed up for eBay, a decade or so before Ryan’s golden age, things were dirt cheap, but they had become more expensive. Shortly after I got my account, and was pecking away at things, a friend of mine told me a story about how their friend, in the ‘90s, was enjoying a real golden age of eBay. He had bought Misfits promotional store displays, from the early 1980s, and their records from then, for maybe $100. (I haven’t seen or heard of anything like those displays ever being sold since.) If you really sit down and think about it how much better (monetarily only) things were back then, it can send you into paralysis.

It’s all the same cognitive dissonance, is what I’m saying. Things are a bit more expensive now, but there is also more out there than can be reined in by our current press and institutions. And so it can be difficult to truly grasp how… much… insane… furniture is out there that we don’t know about. Seeing a hint of this cornucopia explains the excitement. The golden age will come from that.

This is a long, roundabout way of saying that the glut of auctions ending this weekend will be looked back on in five years as a sign that the world (and market) was, for a while, completely bat-shit upside down crazy, and that stuff was so, so available now, and who knows why we didn’t pull the trigger back then. All I’m saying is that this stuff is just out there. Every day. It’s been out there… years ago, decades ago, and it will also be out there in a couple of years. To be sure, lots of shit sucks now. It is nearly impossible for working people, without auctions or a couple of websites, to reliably buy actual good furniture. But not everywhere, and not all the time. The hope is that the glut here inspires people to buy these items and open a store, or design something exciting and democratic, or just look at the photos and see what they like, and, when they feel like it, buy what they like for themselves. The last step is getting it into your hut. It’s in the room between all these things that people can move.

The above essay is free to all subscribers; the specific auctions in question are all part of this auction in Milan that ends Tuesday. My picks, with descriptions and history, follow, below the paywall, along other great design items ending this week.