The choosiest piece of furniture in my living room cost $275. It’s a maybe-antique Mario Buatta-style sofa – elaborate fringe, floral upholstery, chainstitched details – the kind of “piece” that retails for thousands in Georgetown and Savannah and whatever town in the Berkshires antique-mad homosexuals are currently colonizing. When I collected it from the warehouse, the online auctioneer expressed shock (and a touch of dismay) it went so cheap.
In the the land of uncertain values, couldawouldashoulda is currency of the realm.
I buy most of my furniture and decor at auction because my taste runs toward what the hopped-up interior designer Bunny Williams calls “traditional American.” You know that look of sedimentary cultural deposition. Gallery walls. Chinoiserie. Chintz. A little bit of leather. Generally, creating that kind of atmosphere requires years of collecting and a significant outlay, but I have neither patience nor an earmarked budget. What I have is a LiveAuctioneers account, a certain amount of discipline, and the willingness to drive a rented U-Hauls to warehouses run by people with more interest in Tiffany Lamps and federalist cabinetry than inventory management or personal hygiene. Every once in a while I get got, but for the most part the getting is good. Lots of auctioneers with musty odors and plenty of couldawouldashoulda. Very little certainty.
In 1989, Charles W. Smith wrote a short, dull book I can’t recommend – save a few sentences – called Auctions: The Social Construction of Value, which argues that auctions "are not primarily or even in the first place exchange processes" but rather "processes for managing ambiguity and uncertainty of value.” Pulled loose of the bubble wrap, that means auctions create value by imprecisely revealing the willingness to pay of ersatz collector communities formed around specific objects. The auction's power, Smith writes, is "this capacity to confer value – and not to reveal it – to goods without clearly defined value."3
Smith’s work, which has a conferred value of $0 online and $58 in hardcover, raises a question about what it means to buy an 88” faux leather Ethan Sofa at West Elm. One can argue from a revealed preference perspective that all prices are perfect if they get paid. But price tags don’t confer value by moving up, they generally determine willingness to pay by moving down – and, more often than not, they’re affixed to commodity products designed to limit uncertainty. Beyond selling access to Millennial beige, the essential service provided by places like West Elmis the elimination of uncertainty.
But uncertainty is fun. Uncertainty is interesting. Uncertainty is valuable – to me at least – because it produces imperfect systems in which its possible to win. It’s why my dog gets to nap on a really nice sofa.
In his essay "The Cultural Biography of Things," Igor Kopytoff argues that most objects’s commodity status shifts constantly until they disintegrate. That Ethan Sofa s a commodity in the store and kind of a commodity on Facebook Marketplace, but it won’t be a commodity at all decades from now when it washes up in a tent full of “turn-of-the-century antiques” at the Brimfield Fair. As Kopytoff put it: "the period that begins to usher in sacralization is approximately equal to the span of time separating one from one's grandparents' generation."
Auction bidding is, in a sense, gamified sacralization. Players are dropped into a world of of Friedeberg hand chairs and bad watercolors and damask armchairs and endless cabinets of Murano glass (that one is specific to New Jersey) and asked to determine not only the personal value of objects, but their current placement on a commodity spectrum. As Kopytoff acknowledges, there’s a “yearning for singularization in complex societies.”
Somewhere before it reached me, the sofa in my living room had a life – other rooms, other dogs – and despite the fact that I have no idea what any of that looked like, that’s valuable to me. Singularity doesn’t require specificity. Stuff feels like it has a backstory when its main fselling point isn’t its lack of backstory.
And stories do matter. Non-algorithmic consumption, which is to say collecting, is essentially a form of reading. The collector extracts meaning from sacralized objects. The next collector extracts a different meaning. Uncertainty builds.
When I tell people about my wins (say, in a short essay sent to 134,000 people), I’m not suggesting that I have expertise or skill. I don’t. What I have is a highly imperfect process by which I extract meaning, assign it a value, and assert that value as part of a value creation process. After all, determining what constitutes a win is a tautological process. It’s a win because I say so.
Also, I lose constantly. Recently I lost a large 19th century landscape because I refused to go over $250. It sold for $300 and the frame was probably worth twice that. But these things happen. As Smith pointed out, non-professional bids – specifically in the sort of sealed-bid second-price auction auctions (start with your highest bid, pay just over the second highest) held online – function as a moral commitment. I refuse to let others determine the value of what I buy, which is the whole point of not shopping at West Elm in the first place. This is why I feel a sense of shame when I go to high – don’t ask me about the theater box I bought for firewood. I lost a game I chose to play.
Because overpaying is inevitable and pickup is a pain in the ass, I’m not at all certain it makes economic sense to buy furniture or art or Murano glassware at auction. But that’s precisely not the point. The point is that the process also has value and I’m comfortable, having spent years bidding on folk art chests, being uncertain about the precise price that ought to be assigned to amusement.
Uncertainty also opens the door to different viewpoints. Silly as it may sound, my dog can also assess the value of a sofa. Her system is just a little different than mine because she knows the backstory4. She can smell it.
