| Antiques join the Internet age
Every Thursday night, between 200 and 300 people descend on Kuehnert's Auction Gallery in west Houston looking for antiques and fine furniture. For 18 years, the routine has never varied: Buyers browse, find chairs and let the bidding begin. By the end of the night, 400 to 500 items will have been sold, ranging from $50 china boxes to $5,000 English armoires. But starting this month, there's a new twist: Internet bidders will join the fray in real-time bidding during the auctions. Browsing to biddingAccording to gallery owner Patricia Kuehnert, potential buyers already can browse the gallery's Web site, but they've never been able to place a bid as an auction is under way. "We've always had a good, steady clientele, but there's only so much room to display things, and only so much room to hold an auction," Kuehnert said.
Magazine Review: Antiques And The Arts Weekly
We've received a supply at the MagSampler.com newsstand of last week's Antiques And The Arts Weekly, a very impressive publication from The Bee Publishing Company in Newtown, Connecticut. It's a large tabloid newspaper of 160 pages, each 11 by 16 inches, and crammed with articles, pictures and advertisements about art, antiques and collectibles of all kinds. It's a prodigious ongoing publishing achievement!A lengthy article starting on the front page of that January 19 issue provides an appropriate introduction to the world of serious collecting. It's about a new book, Expressions of Innocence and Elegance: Selections from the Jane Katcher Collection of Americana. Jane Katcher is a Florida-based radiologist who's been collecting American paintings, weathervanes and other folk art for years.
Winter Antiques Show Gets Set To Dazzle
On Thursday evening, the Winter Antiques Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory will open to a crowd of collectors and socialites who have paid hundreds of dollars a ticket to get a first look at the objects for sale. The Winter Show, which, along with the International Show, is one of the premier antique shows in New York, exhibits the finest examples of everything from English furniture to American quilts; from antique jewelry to Chinese ceramics, and from medieval sculpture to objets de vertu the French term for beautiful but useless things, like Faberg. "Dealers save their most important pieces for the Winter Antiques Show, so people know they are going to see things they wouldn't see the rest of the year," the show's executive director, Catherine Sweeney Singer, said. "Dealers will say to a client: I have a piece that I know you're going to be interested in, but you need to come to the opening night party to see it.'" The party, sponsored by Elle Decor typically raises over a million dollars for the show's owner, the East Side House Settlement.
Antiques | A shipwreck yields cargo of treasured porcelain
Next week in Amsterdam, Sotheby's will begin selling 76,000 pieces of Chinese Export porcelain recovered from a circa 1725 shipwreck off the coast of present-day Vietnam. Because it was bound for the western market, the cargo reveals the era's fads and fashions in Europe, and precise details about the arduous journey made by goods in demand. The tale of the Cau Mau shipwreck involves connoisseurship, a treasure-hunting adventure suitable for television, and the legendary East India Trading Company (which itself has recently resurfaced in Pirates of the Caribbean dialogue). Today, we'd be short on shoes, hair dryers and electronics without massive container shipments from Asia. What's surprising is that while the journey 250 years ago was infinitely more dangerous, huge cargoes made it through to English and Dutch retailers.
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