1999

21.3

Dennis Hall
Rites of Appraisal and Questions of Value: Public Television’s Antiques Roadshow

An increasingly popular PBS Television series has again risen from that wellspring of American anglophilia and upper middle-class pretension, WGBH-Boston. Chubb’s Antiques Roadshow is the American version of, as is so often the case, a BBC production, The Antiques Roadshow, which has drawn large and enthusiastic audiences for nearly twenty years. The American Roadshow is owned by Dan Farrell, an "American-born, British-educated banker-turned-bookseller" who is now vice-president and general manager of Antique Collectors’ Club, Ltd., a $3,000,000 a year business, principally in books about antiques. The show is produced by Aida Moreno, who for fifteen years produced Championship Ballroom Dancing for PBS, and is hosted by Chris Jussel, a former antiques dealer and founder of the International Antiques Show in New York, who carries himself like an upscale Monty Hall. The show is sponsored by the Chubb Group, an underwriter of American Playhouse on PBS, a big player in fine arts insurance, and one of the few American carriers to affect the aura of Lloyds of London (see Beach).

Roadshow began airing in January, 1997, and is still running during the 1998-99 season. Each one-hour installment is filmed in "different communities through the country" to which Jussel, a video crew, and, as Mitchell Owens reports in the New York Times, "a bevy of blue-ribbon appraisers and experts" travel to "invite the neighbors to bring in a maximum of two heirlooms or curiosities and let the cameras roll"(B1). Well-credentialed appraisers from such auction houses as Christie’s, Southeby’s, and William Doyle Galleries and prominent independent dealers from across the county converge on "convention centers and other spaces able to accommodate between 2,500 and 3,000 participants," a milling crowd that represents the extent and diversity of the growing interest in the treasury of closet, basement, and attic. In Seattle, San Antonio, or Denver these experts, who are quickly achieving star status (see Owens), supply ordinary people with what the "Antiques Roadshow 1997 Tour" web pages describe as "free verbal appraisals, that will tell you both the history and the value of your objects."

One source of the show’s fascination is speculation about the thousands of items patiently borne by the people standing on line whom viewers only glimpse as the camera pans the hall. Although the show, described by Owens as "the antiquary’s Candid Camera" (B1), exhibits a hyperreality, the home viewers get a severely selective and carefully managed re-presentation of the experience of the participants in the hall. The interests of the participants in the hall, on the one hand, are likely to be relatively narrow and personal, focused in the realms of the practical: how much money might this vase or doll fetch? do I keep it or sell it? do I risk offending aunt Sarah? did I make a good deal? is my addiction to yard sales somehow redeemed? is this thing a source of pleasure or pain? The interests of the television audience, on the other hand, are relatively broad and theoretical, focused in domains of knowledge: what is the current market for toys or porcelain? what is collectable these days? how does one examine furniture or paintings or books? where are fakes most likely to turn up? how do experts act and talk and conduct themselves?

Dan Farrell implies this split between participants in the hall and viewers at home when he observes that "Part of Roadshow is about the objects we invest with meaning in our lives. The other part is game show. Everyone’s got the prize, they’re just trying to figure out what it is worth" (Beach). In deciding "which appraisals warrant filming for later broadcast to a national audience," according to the show’s web pages, Aida Moreno also reveals this unavoidable division of interests: "I’m looking for a mix. Either you brought something that was very expensive and it is worth considerably less, you paid very little and it’s priceless, or the piece has a very interesting story." Moreno relies "on the appraisers to flag items meeting these criteria for possible inclusion in the TV series. ‘These appraisers are very good at what they do. They can tell you when a piece was made, how it was originally used, what makes it interesting, and then, of course, how much it is worth. The tension mounts as the owner and the crowd wait for the final word.’" Viewers, given their interests, identify much more readily and fully with the experts and with being "good at what they do" than with the participants who, however charming or alarming, serve as specimens for the display of expertise as much as do the one or two items they tote into the hall. As is characteristic of television’s most successful paradigm, the viewer is cast in the role of voyeur, looking in on an intimate and highly ritualized encounter between a counseling authority figure and a self-revealing supplicant, in this case bearing stuff rather than emotional problems.

According to Beach, Dan Farrell calls Roadshow "This Old Stuff" in a reference to the WGBH hit, This Old House, which divides experience and representation in fundamentally the same way. And do they have the stuff: furniture, firearms and swords, paintings, crockery, china, and glassware, pewter and silverware, watches and jewelry, lamps, and toys are the most common items, but the process also turns up books, advertising materials, celebrity and historical memorabilia, clothing, diaries, autographs and letters, albums, animation cells, tools—a wide range of "collectibles" often with scant regard for their antiquity. In this back water of American popular culture we find the discourse of material culture at its most varied and concrete.

This discourse is usefully understood, I think, in terms of ritual, specifically how Roadshow’s rites of appraisal suggest some of what Arjun Appadurai calls the "distributions of knowledge" that affect the social construction of the value of commodities like antiques and collectibles (41-56). The priests and priestesses of this rite follow a remarkably consistent pattern of five ritual movements, all carried out in the space of three to five minutes of edited, television running time.

First, they interview the owner about his or her "relationship" with the object. The owner is prompted to tell her "story" with such opening gambits as "How did you come by this vase?" "Tell me what you know about this sword?" "Did you play with this doll as a child?" This move is in part an attempt to establish the object’s provenance, and more importantly this move is in part an effort to indulge, for the time being, the pleasures of narrative and personal identity. Generally speaking, the more elaborate, detailed, and personal the history of an object’s ownership, the greater the appraiser’s interest and, consequently, the greater the approval of the owner and often the item itself. The vase great-great-grandmother carried over the Appalachians in a wagon is of greater interest and "value" in this universe of discourse than the identical vase purchased last year at a garage sale. The sword used by an ancestor at Shiloh and used to cut watermelons at family reunions is preferred to the blade purchased at auction. The doll which marked the owner’s tenth birthday, at least at the outset, is of greater interest than one which is part of a collection of twenty. Whatever the condition or market value of the object turns out to be, this first part of the ritual is seen to belong to the supplicant. However briefly, the opening move honors—to one degree or another legitimates—the owner and his object.

Second, the experts anatomize the object itself. They exercise the curious toil of physical examination with the intrusiveness and nominal deference of physicians: handling it (the arms expert always wears white cotton gloves), turning it over, taking it apart, or pointing to this part or mark or feature. Their concurrent commentary notes evidence of the time, place, and circumstances of the object’s making, and explains the social and historical contexts of its past uses and gratifications. In effect these experts provide a brief biography of the thing (see Kopytoff), roughly parallel to the owner’s story of his relationship to the object. The appraisers also note any special perfections or defects compared to others of its kind that might affect the object’s value. The anatomy often concludes with remarks on custodial obligations, praising those who have preserved an object in its original condition ("You must have been a careful little girl while playing with this doll and keeping it in the carton it came in!"), admonishing the careless ("Put a thin coat of light oil on the blade, but not the hilt; don’t cut watermelon with it; and don’t let people handle it."), and warning against the sins of repair and refinishing ("Unrefinished, this chest would be worth three thousand rather than three hundred dollars.").

Third, the experts deliver their appraisal. Commonly, this climactic moment is marked with a question, some variation on "What do you think it is worth?" This questioning, like that in religious rites, does not make a lot of practical sense (may even seem silly), but it does conform to a ritual logic, have a ritual function. The question is delivered to two sorts of participants. The first group is made up of possible candidates for membership in the antique and collectible community, those who do not have the foggiest notion what the object’s value is. This ignorance motivated their participation in the appraisal in first place and is revealed to the experts and the television audience in the first and second ritual moves. In all but a few instances, we believe them when they answer, "I haven’t the faintest idea." This scenario invariably affirms the good news of the faith in antiques. The expert’s considered opinion assures the postulant that the object has market value, whatever the amount declared. And these amounts, whether in the tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars, send the owner into the requisite dumbfounded awe or giddy delight.

The second group of participants includes people who are already members of the antique and collectable community, although neophytes. They come to the altar of appraisal confident that their objects have value, but seeking to know how much, and thus to receive authoritative confirmation of their faith. The expert’s considered opinion of market value either happily validates the supplicant’s own knowledge and sagacity or painfully reveals failures to attend to the articles of the faith. Whatever the outcome, this third move is central to Roadshow’s ritual character, for all of these declarations, of course, must be taken on faith, because the only genuine test of market value is to sell something.

Fourth, the experts deliver an anticlimactic commentary on the significance of the evaluation. Redemption by narrative is a common theme: "This coal bucket, while worth only $75, is a lovely piece of its kind, and it has so much meaning for your family that I know you will want to keep and treasure it." Also common is redemption by savvy investment: "Congratulations! Your $25 at the church rummage sale secured a Rookwood vase, easily worth $2,500." Each show also includes one, and commonly only one, unhappy revelation that serves as a moral lesson. The woman who paid $300 for a painting, palpably disappointed to discover that it is not worth thousands, is offered the consolation of its "being a nice picture" along with the admonition to buy only what one enjoys, what one might want to keep. The man who spent thousands on a collection of Civil War firearms and officiously described for the appraiser the authenticating points of each is told that they are Italian fakes and is curtly enjoined to do better research and take greater care. The moral lessons are clear: reproduction is the Antichrist of antiques, and, more importantly, thou shalt not upstage the cult’s authenticating priests.

And Fifth, there is the epilogue. In the closing move, the expert and owner thank each other, all but genuflecting to the Goddess Antique, who looms over the entire proceeding. The name of the item and the appraised price (or, if needs be, the dreaded word reproduction or worse yet fake) are printed at the bottom of the screen as it dissolves into the next appraisal.

The result is middle-class drama at it most compelling: conflict in several forms, suffused in the codes of market economy at its most elemental. Here we have Masterpiece Theatre without those garish costumes, intricate subplots, and cloying accents.

For all its references to collectibles and collecting, Chubb’s Antiques Roadshow is less concerned about that systematic and discriminating possession of things that, as Werner Muensterberger suggests, turns disillusionment, anxiety, and helplessness into animated, purposeful, and self-defining purposefulness (252, 255, passim) than it is about supplying the needs of collectors. The show is less about the sporting spirit of the hunt than about participating in the market for antiques and collectibles by providing game. In the ordinary run of their lives, middle-class people deal with commodities, with physical objects, in a market primarily as consumers. Their roles as producers are most often either hidden or erased in the segmentations of manufacturing processes or the abstractions of the service economy. They have been trained in consumption by their personal history of buying, by advertising, by the culture at large, to be consumers; they have to one degree or another knowledge and expertise in buying and, consequently, a sense of security in the exercise of that power. When, on the other hand, middle-class Americans either seek or are thrust into the role of providing commodities to a market, they are at sea, often without a clue. They are more likely to know or easily to find out the market value of coal, frequent-flier miles, or sex than the fragmented contents of attics, basements, and garages—stuff for which they have no use and in which they take insufficient gratification to warrant keeping.

Antiques Roadshow, through its rites of appraisal, seeks to make its viewers aware of the domains of knowledge and the social processes that confer value upon such stuff and so make its viewers able sellers as well as buyers. Anthropologists have made a convincing case that the "value," including the market value or "price," of all commodities is socially constructed (see Douglass and Isherwood 36-47, Appadurai 41-63, and Kopytoff) and that the knowledge upon which evaluation is based is discontinuous; that is, there are breaks in communication and gaps in knowledge between producers and consumers (Appadurai 43) that make the process of evaluation complex and mutable. But value is not unknowable, the process hidden or unmanageable, as the precepts and—more tellingly—the example of Roadshow’s experts demonstrate, week after week, ritual exercise after ritual exercise. For all the difference and variety of stuff featured in the show, there is a remarkable sameness about the program. Nothing is as redundant as ritual practice, which in this case focuses the attention of Roadshow’s viewers on the process of evaluation and so reenforces at least the possibility of one’s being able to perform like feats of evaluation. In this regard, the viewer’s experience focused in relatively complex processes is significantly different from that of the participant in the hall, who is primarily interested in a valuation, a marshalling of the expert’s knowledge to yield a result, a product—a sense of what it’s worth in the current market.

Roadshow develops the viewer’s sense of evaluation as a process through a ritual representation of what amounts to a sort of neoplatonic dialogue between mutually exclusive notions of value: value founded in intrinsic and extrinsic qualities; in an independence of markets and in a dependence upon markets; in a personal or singularizing function of ownership and an impersonal or collectivizing function of ownership; in concepts of use and concepts of exchange. Roadshow does not attempt to reconcile these differences in a postmodern parody of the via media; indeed, when push comes to shove, the program comes down squarely on the side of the extrinsic, market dependent, collective, and exchange views of value. It remains, however, resolutely focused on what is valued, and its accounts of why things are valued recognize the contribution of the opposing views to the process of value formation. A participant, for example, brings to the Roadshow appraisal ritual a pocket watch. The pocket watch in turn provokes a story, a sense-making construct that confirms what Francis Seton identifies as that seemingly ingrained "common sense" that the value of such an intricate and painstakingly made object is somehow inherent in the object (11-12). In fact, the role that the watch has played in the life of the participant and his ancestors apparently gives the watch added value. The expert, for her part, then brings to this ritual knowledge of the material culture that spawned the watch and so provokes another story—a cultural biography of that watch, also a sense-making construct that confirms the value the market places upon the watch and the role it and others of its kind have played in the lives of many individuals, a role that again adds value to the pocket watch.

At first blush, Chubb’s Antiques Roadshow runs the risk of being taken for a trivial pursuit, a conspicuous display of greed clothed in connoisseurship and so made palatable to the middle-class tastes of the PBS audience. Indeed, one could make a good case for such a reading. But to examine this program in terms of ritual, specifically to seek to discover how its rites of appraisal work, is to appreciate its rather careful and accurate axiology. Roadshow’s subtle description of what is valued in the realm of antiques and collectibles and—much more importantly—how value is socially constructed in this realm, provides for most audiences a far more effective and useful account of the process of evaluation at work in postmodern culture than the accounts given by most philosophers, historians, and economists. And one applicable to many other popular cultural texts.

Dennis Hall
Department of English
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292

Appadurai, Arjun. "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value." The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Appadurai. New York:Cambridge U P, 1986. 3-63.

Beach, Laura. "Dan Farrell: Getting His Show on the Road." <http://www.thebee.com/aweb/achricve/farrell.htm> 24 September 1997.

The Cultures of Collecting. Ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Cambridge, MA:Harvard U P, 1994.

Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. Rev. ed. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Kopytoff, Igor. "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process." Appadurai, ed. 64-91.

Muensterberger, Werner. Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 1994.

Owens, Mitchell. "Antiques Stars Return to the Scene Of First Loves." New York Times 4 Sept. 1997: B1, B7.

Rigby, Douglas and Elizabeth. Lock, Stock and Barrel: The Story of Collecting. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1944.

Seton, Francis. The Economics of Cost, Use, and Value. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992.