It's Friday...

It's Friday morning and plotting out the day.  Read the Times online, emails, some scanning to add to the database (that is what DESIGNbase® is all about after all), return some calls, initiate some others, muse about life or the lack there of.  AA meeting was a good one this morning, Fridays always seem to be the best of the week.  Perhaps it's the extra support to get through the weekend, that typical bastion of party mode.  

Ill end up the day going to the local auction at 6:00, a general sale tonight, always the best.  The 'Antique' sales are always a little boring, sanitized, having been vetted to cull out the junk and used furniture.  That gives instant rise to the old saying "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder".  How true.  Those of us that swim in the modern pool love that junk and used furniture, we'd drown without it.  AmVets, Salvation Army, used furniture stores on the other side of the tracks; ya just gotta pull in.  Stand alone Antique stores with the owner's shinny clean Land Rover parked prominently in front... well, maybe not so much.  Fond memories picking back in the mid-seventies of seeing an occasional sign for 'Ye Ole Antique Shoppe'.  Always elicited the smirking comment "floor it".  

Thinking that the 'official' definition of antique, as set by U.S. Customs office, is 100 years, then where does that leave everything that is less than 100 years old?  Hmmn, that means the late 1940s Carlo Mollino table that brought 3+ million at Christie's last year really is just used furniture.  Chopped liver is not for me but some say it's pretty tasty.

Thinking about tonight, I wonder what will be at the sale tonight.  A sleeper perhaps?  If so will anyway else be there that recognizes it.  I always feel that my odds are better than most to discover the sleeper, those pearls before swine.  No sooner do I pen those comments that I am reminded of the meaning of hubris, remind myself smug is not a positive attribute, and realize there must be untold, countless items out of my area of specialty that I have walked by and dismissed as 'stuff' only to be watched by some other dealer or collector waiting to see if I would stop and examine it as a way of gauging the interest level in their 'sleeper'.   The old 'watching and waiting' to see if it remains at sleep or awakens moments before the hammer falls.  Antique dealers are an interesting lot, cunning at best, ethically challenged at times.  Auctions still excite, one simply never knows what's gonna show.  Like Forest Gump's box of chocolates.