Wednesday, December 23, 2009
NEWS HEARD DURING A SNOWY WEDDING WEEKEND
Quite a weekend--went to a wedding in Washington, D.C., and got snowed in. Most guests missed the rehearsal dinner (so did the bride and groom), but locals and the wedding party got to the wedding the next day. Heard a lot of news. Producers of the "Antiques Roadshow" were excited when, in June, their experts appraised a group of four 18th-century jades for over a million dollars--the highest-priced "find" in the history of the show. But the jades auctioned in October for a total of a little under a half-million dollars. A better ending was at the auction of a very important letter written by George Washington in 1787. Estimated at $2.5 million, it sold this month for $3.2 million.
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2 comments:
If the "appraisers" = dealers on the Road Show don't get their act together and start quoting reasonable estimates it will come back to bite them in their collective butts. The prices given for the most part are far above retail or replacement value, they are totally absurd.
There are two sides to every coin, and finally we get the flip side of the Antiques Roadshow toss. On the one hand the show brought positive attention to the wonderful world of antiques. Exciting! Yet as many dealers know - those of us who buy from the general public - folks began to overvalue both the antique-ness and price of some rather ordinary stuff. And then of course there is the reality of a changing market that those not in the business don't realize. So, thanks for the personal insight into what perhaps many of us believed, but made us second-guess our own professional and personal experience.
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