Ah, the gift that keeps on giving, or least has been giving steadily since last May. Yes folks, I’m talking about the ever-present Salt Lake City Antiques theft scandal, that has ensnared a half dozen people, led to one guilty plea already and has seen charges dismissed against two individuals. This time, however, in the case of John W. Pilcher, there was never any doubt about either his involvement in the case, or his guilt, which was decided definitively on Aug. 18, 2008.

I’ll do my best to keep this brief brief.

Pilcher plead guilty on Aug. 18 to a class A misdemeanor theft, in 3rd District court, which carries with it up to a year in jail. He’ll be sentenced on Nov. 3 before Judge Robin Reese.

That sentence and that plea is actually a win-win for Pilcher, who originally was charged with participating in an antique theft ring and knowingly selling a stolen painting to a local antique dealer. That charge carried with it as many as 15 years in the clink. Given the alternative possibility of 15 years, there's question that in the same predicament I'd plead down to a year. I assume Pilcher thought the same.

Pilcher sold the painting, Approaching Storm by artist Edward Evans, to Salt Lake dealer Anthony Christensen for $5,000 in February. Christensen valued the painting at $30,000 and returned the merch to its true owner as soon as he was informed that it was stolen. If you remember every single StyleWire post – I know you do – then you’ll remember that I write a few weeks ago about the charges against Christensen being dismissed; a good call, I’d say.

Pilcher, however, bought the stolen art from one of the thieves out of the trunk of his car, in a Sears parking lot, for about $1,000. Hard to deny knowing that was a shady deal.

Here’s a link to The Salt Lake Tribune and the update on the story.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 25, 2008

I like this editorial in the Reading Eagle, out of Reading, Pa., from Tuesday, Aug. 19 about the mayor of the city appointing a “new” Public Art Task Force for the city, to help decide on public art projects and to be financed with .5 percent assessment on city development. What the editorial board of the paper is suggesting is that the city look at the models some other cities use in deciding what goes on display for public art, and to give the people of the city a say in what decorates their streets.

I think this is a great idea, and there is obviously a back story in the Reading area that goes with this. It seems that there was a Fine Arts Board in Reading that made public art decisions for 31 years, a good many of which the people of the city didn’t agree with. That disagreement was apparently met with a somewhat snobbish attitude from the board. Eventually they were fired. According to the first comment after the editorial, however, a good number of the members of the new board served on the old board. How this will play out is anybody’s guess. It’s good, interesting fun no matter how you parse it. I hope the board is smarter this time around.

I imagine this is a problem in a lot of medium-size towns and cities across America. You have “experts” appointed to positions of authority in determining what is good public art and what is not. The problem, however, is that taste in art is a purely subjective thing. It can be based on one’s ability to think abstractly, one’s level of education or lack thereof, or on one’s desire not to have to think when faced with art, but just to simply feel. There’s almost no way to win in a situation like this, for any one. It just gets worse when the “experts” look down their noses at the plebes of a society who don’t have the taste to understand the choice. Truth be told, however, how many times have you yourself – be honest now – seen a large piece of outdoor sculpture, or a mural on the side of a building, and said to yourself, 'What the heck is that?'

The Eagle’s editorial board suggests that Reading look at the examples set by two towns in South Dakota, one of which is to invite a host of artists to display pieces in a central space and have folks vote on their favorite – ah, democracy. The other is to find a theme, like presidents or sports figures or whatever…

I happen to like the first idea the best, though I should be careful what I wish for, and that’s the art snob in me speaking. I do, however, think the public will should be done when art is presented in its name. Invite 70 or 80 artists to present ideas, let everyone take a look and choose the one that speaks to the most people. That way no one could say they didn’t get their say.

Here’s a link to the Reading Eagle’s editorial. Check it out.

- Noah Fleisher, Aug. 24, 2008

I always find stories like this a bit disconcerting, because it seems to me that the idea of “antiques” is pretty self-explanatory, and that any community that has rules in place to a) punish people who run these businesses or b) exclude them from setting up shop, has some soul-searching to do.

Such is the case with South Daytona,Fla., which has had an ongoing battle for the past several years about whether or not to allow antiques dealers to open shops in the city's Community Redevelopment Area Overlay District.

I guess, from reading this article from the East Volusia News, that the dispute on the town council in the years preceding the current town council, is that businesses will open that call themselves antique shops but will have only a bunch of cheap tchotchkes, read "collectibles," masquerading as real antiques. This, in turn, would bring down the overall value of the neighborhood, because we all know that Daytona – home to NASCAR and mega Spring Break parties – has the rep of one of the classiest places in the U.S. In case you can’t see my face right now, I’m being sarcastic.

It seems, though, that the council of South Daytona, with a new “forward-thinking” mayor, has settled on a revolutionary new definition of what an antique is. Get this: It’s something that is more than 100 years old. Crazy, man, crazy. Anything else that is valuable, but under a century old, is collectible - even Mid-Century Modern, which is in great supply and great demand in Florida… even Daytona.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see if the vote talked about in the article, linked to here, opens the door for antiques in that part of South Florida.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 20, 2008

This is a story from the New York Times that is near and dear to my heart, and not just because I love good neo-classical architecture. It’s actually because the building that the writer in this story talks about is a somewhat down at the heels but still very cool old synagogue on East 6th Street in the East Village, which was my home neighborhood for the majority of the dozen years that I lived in Manhattan. I passed this building frequently over the years, had a girlfriend who lived not more than two buildings down from it, and frequented a bar right next to the synagogue, which you can see with red brick right next to the synagogue in the picture.

The gist of the story is a battle between preservationists and members of the congregation who want the building razed and rebuilt for the members of the synagogue, because it’s in such a state of disrepair.

There is something quite beautiful and endearing about the building, and a Columbia professor, Andrew Dolkart – not involved in the dispute – who was interviewed in the article summed it up perfectly, capturing the very spirit of what makes it such an interesting building, when he said: “It wasn’t designed by a sophisticated architect. It wasn’t a pioneering building. It was an architect who was looking at what sophisticated designers were doing and then adapting it in an inexpensive and not so sophisticated manner, to create a kind of folk classicism, almost.”

Well said. The folk classicism bit is spot on, and speaks volumes about the building’s origins. It was erected at a time when very poor immigrants were flooding the Lower East Side, and sought a place to practice their faith. There are many such synagogues in the neighborhood, some in better shape, some in worse and some that have already been demolished. There is no doubt that this is an issue that stirs deep emotions in those involved in the debate.

For my part, as a lover of great and iconic architecture, I want to see the building saved. It ties directly into a very important time in American history, and is a shrine of sorts to the tenacity of the Jewish people at the time of the great immigration at the turn of the 20th century.

As a believer in religious freedom, and in the rights of a congregation to decide its own fate, I have to believe the people who are in favor of the rebuilding – especially considering that it’s difficult to even access the synagogue in inclement weather – have a right to do what they please with their building, and to ensure the continuation of their place of worship.

Check out the NYT article here and decide for yourself.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 20, 2008

An interesting story today, Aug. 18, in The Brooklyn Paper, regarding the viability of the antiques trade on Atlantic Avenue, once the favorite place to go for antiques not only in New York City’s favorite borough, but perhaps in all of the city’s eight boroughs put together. In the 1980s you could go down to Atlantic Avenue and find an amazing mix of antiques from all era – Victorian to Modern – in more than 40 different shops. Today, however, only about a dozen remain, and there’s no telling how long they’ll last.

My mentor in the antiques business, one Harold Hanson – affectionately known to any lucky enough to be his friend as "Uncle Harold" – was one of those that had a shop on Atlantic Avenue in the 1980s, after fleeing Wall Street. Many were the afternoons that he would sit and talk about his shop, and about all the great antiques he was able to buy and sell all along what is now possibly the hippest neighborhood outside of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Those days are gone, however, as evidenced by much more than the article in The Brooklyn Paper, but I like the writing and the tone of this article because it’s honest, and the dealers that the writer interviews give a straightforward assessment of the changing times along the strip.

Almost all the dealers interviewed cite the Internet as a major factor in the downturn and eventual extinction of the antiques shop on Atlantic, and many are talking about how the stagnant economy, even in NYC, is affecting the buying habits of people. There’s also the easy availability of chic Modern furnishing at easier to afford prices – Ikea anyone? – and the fact that the owners of those million-dollar brownstones, even if they spend on the houses, are not putting out for the furnishings. And if they are, how many $12,000 bedroom suites or oak tables are the going to buy?

It’s sad to think of, especially since Atlantic Avenue represents such an important part of the 1970s and 1980s boom that made so many of the names in the business that populate influential programs like the Roadshow and its ilk. As the article concludes, and rightly so, change is the nature of things, even if that thing happens to be a business about things that haven’t changed in centuries, which gives them their value.

Here’s a link to the article. It’s worth a few minutes to check out.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 20, 2008

Um… Come again?

Yes, Sandro Bondi, the Italian Minister of Culture actually said that, and also that he has a definite distaste for Modern Architecture. It’s a little surreal, really, considering that this is coming from the top culture official one of the world’s most prolific and influential artistic countries. The Italians have led the way through centuries of art and architecture, and have produced some of the greatest examples of Modernism – architecture, art and furniture – in the whole of the movement over the past 100 years.

The sad part of this is not that Bondi actually said it, but that he’s following suit with Italy’s current prime minister, media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, who has launched several well-documented tirades of late on a few different planned Modern buildings in Rome. Not that Berlusconi could ever have been said to be an important arbiter of taste, but this is just a little mind-boggling, and it’s gotten a lot of play in European media and drawn a lot of ire from Italian artistic and architectural institutions. Rightly so, I might add.

Here’s another gem from Bondi, from the article that appeared in the Italian magazine Grazia, and subsequently in the UK’s Guardian newspaper on July 13 – it’s July 15 as I write this:

"I struggle to find evidence of beauty in contemporary art. If I go to an exhibition I pretend to understand, like many others. But, honestly, I don't understand."

Um… Come again?

The response from the arts community was swift and angry. Here’s what Francesco Bonami, a curator of the very important Venice Biennale, had to say in Italy’s La Stampa:

"Bondi appears to have fallen asleep in 1895, when the Biennale was launched, to then reawake in 2008," he said. "You cannot rely on an antiquated concept of beauty, that's like wanting to go back to the horse and cart."

Well said. I couldn’t agree more. One of Berlusconi’s attacks focused on a planned building, designed by New York City architect Daniel Libeskind, who is the chief architect on the Freedom Towers at the site of the twin towers in Manhattan. The attack concerned the building’s “Modern” curved design. I kid you not; Berlusconi asked if the building couldn’t be straightened out.

Um… Come again?

Lebiskind was quick to repsond with a savage bard about Mussolini, fascism and how “everything that was not straight or in line was also deemed perverted art.”

There has been no response since from Berlusconi or Bondi. I don’t know about you, but this is just bizarre.

Here’s a link to the Guardian.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 15, 2008

There’s really not a tremendous amount of news relevant to the antiques and design business that comes out of Wisconsin, so this one immediately caught my eye, for a couple of reasons.

The first is that it’s about a town called Evansville, part of the greater Janesville area, just inside the border with Illinois. It’s an area that has been particularly hard hit by the sluggish economy, especially because it’s home to a huge GM plant that specializes in SUVs, and was recently slated to be shut down permanently in 2010. Secondly, I happen to live in Wisconsin right now – for another month, anyway – and have seen and experienced first hand how bad the economy is here.

The article linked to below, from the Janesville Gazette of today, Aug. 14, is talking about the impending opening of Windmill Antiques and Company, a planned 23-dealer shop. Town officials are hoping that the shop’s opening, along with extensive restoration and road re-building, will draw local and out-of-town visitors to the Evansville Center.

I wish them all the luck in the world – the center and the town both. It’s going to be a tough go of it, that’s for sure. It’s interesting to me to see a town turning to antiques as a hope for an upswing. Mostly these days you see group shops and malls going out of business because of the lack of disposable income among likely buyers.

To me, this says that the area desperately needs something positive to happen, and that antiques could be that thing because there are a lot of good buys to be had right now, even when people are struggling. The truth is that many antique dealers are offering tremendous deals on all level of antique and collectibles to keep their business rolling and, in the spirit of Windmill Antiques, using that availability to drive economic renewal. I hope, for all of our sakes, that this goes well. If it can work in the upper Midwest, then it can work anywhere.

I have to add that the town is also home to a very fine collection of excellent late-19th to early 20th-century architecture.

Here’s the link to the article.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 14, 2008

Last month, July 2008, the ADGB Trade Union School in Berlin, salvaged and updated by Brenne Gesellschaft von Architekten, was awarded the very first World Monument Fund “Modernism at Risk” award. Knoll, the design firm that is synonymous with Modern design and its greatest names, is a co-sponsor of the prize. It’s a great choice, a great building and a very deserving recipient.

The ADGB has a long history, part of it storied and part of it just sad. It’s a classic Bauhaus building, as you can see by the pictures here. The box design, the flowing lines, the great color and the seamless blending of spaces; all of it speaks of the legendary designers. And the building originally sprang from the minds of Hannes Meyer—who, from 1928 to 1930, served a controversial stint as the director of Bauhaus—and his colleague Hans Wittwer.

It only lasted a few years as a school for ADGB before it was commandeered by the Nazis and used to train the SS. After the war, the East German Trade Union took it over as a place to train its members. Along the way, the original building, and its intention, were literally buried, and for all intents and purposes lost to history. Lost, that is, until Brenne Gesellschaft came along and won the open bid to restore the building, which cost the equivalent of $28 million. The firm had worked on buildings by Gropius, van der Rohe and Mendelsohn, among many, and was a perfect choice to bring the building back to its original glory.

I have to say that I get a certain amount of personal satisfaction from the following story. It’s about a woman, Patricia Jacoby, who owned an antiques business in the Raleigh, N.C. area called Posh! (now closed), who just received a jail sentence of 10 years for conducting an elaborate Ponzi scheme. It involved unsuspecting people who invested in antiques to the tune of more than $2 million over a period of a few years. It was a classic “invest a little, get a lot” scam where people gave money in good faith, were told they’d have quadruple their money in a week, and never got a cent more out of it.

Why would I get personal satisfaction out of it, other than liking to see criminals get their due? One year ago, almost to the day, I came across a breaking story out of Raleigh about a woman who went to a local TV station with the story about being scammed by Jacoby and wanting restitution for her $20,000. The woman’s name is Lorraine Buccelllato, and she’s a transplanted New Yorker, a deeply religious lady and a total spitfire. I found her email address via some nifty e-researching, and called her the next day. She talked my ear off for two solid hours nonstop. I wrote the story for an antiques paper I was working for at the time, and broke it to the antiques community at large – hence the satisfaction.

Buccellato faced tremendous resistance from her community and her church, where she was approached by Jacoby. She stayed on top of her own lawyers and the Fed, and was one of the driving forces in getting Jacoby convicted. She found out the woman had been part of other pyramid schemes, and had served two different brief jail terms before. She only lost $20,000 – I say “only” because some people lost hundreds of thousands of dollars – but refused to be cowed. One way scammers get away with this type of thing is because their victims are too embarrassed at being taken in such a way, so they never come forward.

Not so for Buccellato, as evidenced by her statements at the sentencing, documented in the online article from WRAL-TV, he affiliate she went to initially for help. Was Buccellato embarrassed by what happened to her? Sure. Was that going to stop her? No way. She stuck with it, took an obvious criminal out of the game and witnessed that crook being taken away to serve a jail term. I’m sure she took great personal satisfaction in seeing it all come to an end.

I say congratulations to Lorraine, and urge you to read the story, linked to here at WRAL-TV, to see what can and should happen to all scammers, not just those who do it in the antiques business.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 14, 2008

It has been widely reported in the last week that the St. Louis, Mo., city council voted unanimously to recommend that a local house Chuck Berry lived in from 1950 to 1958 be designated a national historical site. It’s the house that Berry called home when he wrote several of his greatest songs, including “Maybelline,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” and “Johnny B. Goode.”

I say go for it. Berry’s a living legend, the ultimate guitarist and widely considered one of, if not the founding father of rock and roll. I’m sure there are many who would agree with me, not the least of whom would be Berry himself, who has never had any problem telling anyone who would listen that he was the greatest living musician and the man responsible for rock’s signature sound.

From an architectural standpoint, the house is nothing to write home about. It’s a plain little shotgun-style one-story, a bit run down and in a neighborhood that is not exactly high end. Even if it gets the historic designation, there’s nothing to stop the owner – it’s not owned now, a victim of a recent foreclosure – from remodeling it or ripping it down completely, but it does bring with it certain tax benefits.

What’s so interesting about the push for the designation is that it’s never been given to a site that is connected to a living person. Still, if anyone deserves it, I would say that Mr. Berry should get the props. He is what makes the place so significant and, now in his 80s, crochety as all get out, and still performing, you have to wonder how much longer he’ll be around.

I have many issues about how Berry has lived his life and used his fame, often in ignominious ways to be sure, but this is another instance where you have to weigh the art against the artist. You have to be on one side of the debate or the other, no equivocating, and I come down firmly on the side of the art outweighing the artist. Many a despicable person has created art of great depth and lasting legacy. Berry’s influence ripples through rock music today, and will continue to do so for generations to come.

Here’s a link to St. Louis Today, and its front page article from Aug. 4. And here’s hoping that the National Register powers that be see their way clear to giving the house the honor it deserves as a place of historic import in music history.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 14, 2008