By Michael Drake
Art & Antiques
A
lmost six months ago I asked myself a question which was on many people’s minds at that time. Was this going to be the end of auctions as we have known them over the years? The answer I would have given you then was an emphatic ‘yes’ and today my feeling is still in the affirmative. But don’t get me wrong I did not mean, in any way, the demise of auctions. Of course since the insidious epidemic hit us there have been casualties in every walk of commercial life but then again we have been passing through unprecedented times. We have been sailing in what look like un-charted seas and now we are emerging, albeit slowly, from it all there is indeed some light at the end of the tunnel. But we have been here before, just
not the victim of an influenza-type virus. Auction houses have survived plagues before and they will do so again. And if the form they survive in is different in many respects to what we have been accustomed to, then we will accept it and move on. Thanks to ever-expanding technology we have been able in recent years to bring the auction house, in fact practically any kind of sales venue, to the living room, the sitting room, the kitchen and probably even the bathroom. So accessible are sales today we, if we really want to, can conduct purchases from the bed or the side of a mountain if that is what we wish. Sometimes in the recent past we have cursed such technology or depriving us of the age we grew up in. An age when dark, dank auction rooms were the attraction and the possibility of finding
a ‘hidden’ treasure our goal. Those times have gone and the circumstances we find ourselves in are already speeding up the process of change. ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ may be a saying of old but it very pertinent today when applied to auction houses and other sales sources. On-line buying has been the salvation of many wishing to make purchases in order to survive the present situation. It has also been the salvation of those who are almost addicted to sourcing the Internet on a daily and nightly basis looking for that bargain, that ‘sleeper’ from either the art or the antiques world which has evaded them for so long. To people like myself, selfquarantining deep in the heart of the countryside, it has been a reason for keeping ‘cabin fever’ at bay. There are only so many soaps, serials or sagas one
Tadeusz Brzozowski’s Mastiff (Cwajnos) €190,000 (Whytes) Irish Country Sports and Country Life Autumn 2020
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