What is an antique, exactly? Or the more pertinent question should be - what is not an antique? Since that hallowed television institution known as The Antiques Roadshow arrived in America in 1997 the term antique has become a rather vague moniker for anything “old”.
You see it all the time. Perhaps you think you’ll hit a few Saturday yard sales and so you go online and peruse the listings on Craigslist or some other similar site. “Lots of Stuff Including Antiques” a headline says. As a collector your ears prick up at the word antiques, a bit like a dog who’s just heard the rustle of his favorite bag of treats. So you put it on your list with the other ads which have boasted having antiques and go to bed dreaming that perhaps tomorrow will be the day that you finally find that long lost Rubens laying against the wall in someone’s garage.
But the reality is almost always quite different; especially here in Las Vegas. You turn up to the first place that advertised “lots of antiques”. Before you’ve made five steps up the driveway you gaze past the boxes of baby clothes and clusters of unattractive furniture; all old, certainly, but not antique. You rifle through a box of books that looks promising. No antiques here, you think. And so you ask. “Your advertisement said antiques...?” The unwitting proprietor of this ploy to get you out of bed early on Saturday cheerfully points to any number of dusty plates from the 1980s with Fred Flintstone on them, or a pile of National Geographic magazines from the early 90s that they clearly kept in the hopes that “someday” they’d be valuable. My favorite is the “antique” that still has the price tag from Home Goods on the bottom.
Generally when this scenario happens to me I go to McDonalds, order a cheeseburger, eat it in the car on the way home, and follow it up with a nap. C’est la vie!
You see it all the time. Perhaps you think you’ll hit a few Saturday yard sales and so you go online and peruse the listings on Craigslist or some other similar site. “Lots of Stuff Including Antiques” a headline says. As a collector your ears prick up at the word antiques, a bit like a dog who’s just heard the rustle of his favorite bag of treats. So you put it on your list with the other ads which have boasted having antiques and go to bed dreaming that perhaps tomorrow will be the day that you finally find that long lost Rubens laying against the wall in someone’s garage.
But the reality is almost always quite different; especially here in Las Vegas. You turn up to the first place that advertised “lots of antiques”. Before you’ve made five steps up the driveway you gaze past the boxes of baby clothes and clusters of unattractive furniture; all old, certainly, but not antique. You rifle through a box of books that looks promising. No antiques here, you think. And so you ask. “Your advertisement said antiques...?” The unwitting proprietor of this ploy to get you out of bed early on Saturday cheerfully points to any number of dusty plates from the 1980s with Fred Flintstone on them, or a pile of National Geographic magazines from the early 90s that they clearly kept in the hopes that “someday” they’d be valuable. My favorite is the “antique” that still has the price tag from Home Goods on the bottom.
Generally when this scenario happens to me I go to McDonalds, order a cheeseburger, eat it in the car on the way home, and follow it up with a nap. C’est la vie!