RINKER ON COLLECTIBLES — Column #1438

Copyright © Harry Rinker, LLC 2014

Reuse Value: A 21st Century Perspective

I open my mail with a sterling silver, late Georgian meat skewer.  Each time, I wonder how many birds and roasts were skewered by the cooks who used it.  I envision, perhaps dream is a better word choice, the Georgian meat skewer passing through a number of generations before it found its way into the antiques market and was sold not as a functional meat skewer but a period example of Georgian silver or a kitchen novelty from a bygone era.

[Author’s Asides #1:  The Merriam-Webster free online dictionary defines skewer as: “a long pointed piece of metal or wood that is pushed through pieces of food to keep them together or hold them in place for cooking.”  Do not think kabob.  My Georgian meat skewer never was intended to hold pieces of meat and vegetables destined to be cooked over an open fire.  It was a kitchen tool of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie.

As it turns out, my use of the Georgian meat skewer is not unique.  When I researched Georgian, Victorian, and later meat skewers on internet websites, I found them advertised as “skewer or letter opener.”  How many modern sellers know how Victorian meat skewers were meant to be  used?  My guess is not many.]

For the purpose of this column, reuse and recycle are synonymous.  There are subtle differences.  Reuse is defined as “reuse more than once” and recycle has a tertiary definition of “use again.”  Since antiques and collectibles often have multiple reuses, reuse value is preferable over recycled value, albeit both are acceptable.

Reuse is the primary objective of the antiques and collectibles trade.   Collectors tout a preservation approach.  Auctioneers, dealers, and other sellers are driven by financial motive.  Decorators disguise their profit motive by stressing aesthetics, conversation, and nostalgia.  In the final analysis, everyone involved in the transfer of antiques and collectibles is recycling them.
Reuse value is multi-faceted.  This column explores five specific reuse values—functional, decorative, repurposed, environmental, and scrap—that differ from collector, decorator, nostalgia, and family value.

A chair is a chair.  If other reasons to own it fail, it can be sat upon.  Objects do not lose their functionality as they age.  As objects age, they do have to be treated more delicately than when first made, something everyone learns from practical experience as they age.  While an object’s functionality may no longer be fashionable or desired, its initial use always is present.

“Cheaper than new” is the driving force behind buying antiques and collectibles to reuse for the purpose for which they were made.  The list of “cheaper than new” antiques and collectible is a long one – clothing and clothing accessories, dinnerware, flatware, furniture, jewelry, lamps, musical instruments, stemware, and textiles.

Discount household goods, such as craft items and kitchen utensils, are recyclable garage/yard sale material.  Although antiques and collectibles sellers are recyclers, they are not junk dealers.  Antiques and collectibles functional reuse mixes a strong sense of quality with a specific-purposed reuse.

Antiques and collectibles values occasionally crossover.  Decorative value and decorative reuse value are kissing cousins.  Reuse value means changing the surface appearance of an object to make it functional to its owners.  It is not conservation (stabilizing an object to prevent further deterioration) or restoration (returning an object to its period appearance.) 

Decorative reuse can be as simple as applying a coat of paint, white still seems to be the preferred color to hide an object’s flaws, or reupholstering a piece of furniture with a non-period fabric pattern that matches the décor of the owner’s home.  Taken to the extreme, objects are enhanced to the point where it is difficult to recognize the unaltered object.

Shabby Chic, viewed by some as decorative reuse, has reared its ugly, distasteful head once again.  Once a Look becomes part of the design vocabulary it never goes away.  Shabby Chic recycles material that more appropriately belongs in the landfill.  It is cutesy primitive.  While I prefer to take a neutral stance in my columns, this is one issue about which I cannot.  Ugly is ugly.

Decorative reuse and repurposing are two different sub-reuse values.  Decorative reuse results in the object being used for its initial functional purpose.  Repurposing takes objects and uses them to create new objects that differ in purpose from the converted object.  The concept is not new.  I recently replaced the copy of Edwin G. Warman’s “Cash from Trash: Ideas for converting old, unused or unwanted items into saleable merchandise” (Uniontown, PA: E. G. Warman Publishing Co., 1957) that was in the old Rinker Enterprises library.  “What comes around, goes around” as the old saying goes.  Repurposing constantly reinvents itself.

During a May visit to Chicago’s Randolph Street Market, more than a dozen booths featured recycled items.  There appears to be no limit to the creative use of late 19th / early 20th century pressed ceiling tin.  The options ranged from picture frame and mirrors to cut silhouettes of animal and human figures and three-dimensional abstract sculptures.

Jeff Snider (www.jssculptures.com) bills his creations as “illuminated sculpture.”  His work is a definite improvement on the 35mm movie projectors, irons, and other objects that have been drilled and utilized as lamp bases.  I continue to wrestle with the question as to whether or not repurposed material is art.  I can accept art collages and sculptures that incorporate objects or parts of objects.  This art is meant to hang on a wall or be displayed.  Repurposed art takes objects and change them into a new functional object.  This is not art.

[Author’s Aside #2:  Slightly more than a year ago, I devoted two “Rinker on Collectibles” columns to repurposing – column #1380 and column #1382.  The columns are available on www.harryrinker.com in the archives section of “Harry’s Recent Columns” URL.]

The environmental reuse argument has several components.  First, it advocates using antiques and collectibles as they were originally intended to avoid the necessity of manufacturing new objects, thus reducing the use of endangered materials.  Time has demonstrated that few individuals support this viewpoint and no significant amount of endangered material has been saved.  Second, the current generations have ignored, or at the very least resisted, the back to nature movement.  The current generation is futuristic, materialistic, and digital.  Third, the off-gas concerns with modern plastics that led to a demand for mid-20th century glass kitchenware have passed.  [Pun definitely intended.]  Today’s young adults are Crate ‘n Barrel, Ikea, Pottery Barn, Target, and Walmart fixated.

Some antiques malls still are prompting the reuse of antiques and collectibles as a sub-culture of the Go-Green movement.  The more rural the mall location, the more successful the sales pitch.  It falls on blind eyes and deaf ears in urban/metropolitan markets.

The final reuse value is scrap, recycling the material used to make an object.  In today’s throwaway society, the tendency is to send unwanted items to the landfill as opposed to recycling them.  In areas where there are recycling laws, individuals are more willing to allow their sanitation company to recycle scrap for them than to do it themselves.  Having a step-son-in-law in the demolition business, I have a new appreciation for the value of scrap such as bricks and metals.  The same holds true for the copper gutter, downspout, and wiring thieves.

No one has trouble accepting that gold and silver coins and other items have melt value.  Take a few minutes and check out the other metals—copper, iron, and platinum.  When a merchant removes your old dishwasher, dryer, refrigerator, stove, or washer, he takes it to a scrap dealer and not the landfill.

If an object does not have collector, decorator, or nostalgia value, it still has reuse value.  The amount of value might be minimal, but it always is present.

Rinker Enterprises and Harry L. Rinker are on the Internet.  Check out www.harryrinker.com.

You can listen and participate in WHATCHA GOT?, Harry’s antiques and collectibles radio call-in show, on Sunday mornings between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM Eastern Time.  If you cannot find it on a station in your area, WHATCHA GOT? streams live and is archived on the Internet at www.gcnlive.com.

SELL, KEEP OR TOSS?  HOW TO DOWNSIZE A HOME, SETTLE AN ESTATE, AND APPRAISE PERSONAL PROPERTY (House of Collectibles, an imprint of the Random House Information Group, $17.99), Harry’s latest book, is available at your favorite bookstore and via www.harryrinker.com.