The world of antiques can be divided into two time periods: the pre-internet age – anytime before about 1996 – and our current internet age. At first glance, it might not be apparent exactly why this event would dramatically impact the notoriously traditional antiques trade. After all, antiques are an entire industry built around buying, selling, collecting and investing in items from the past – oftentimes the distant past. Antiques couldn’t be more antithetical to high tech innovations like the internet.
But that didn’t stop the internet age from absolutely eviscerating large swaths of the antiques industry. How did it do this? Quite simply, the internet revealed that many, many types of collectibles that were previously believed to be scarce were actually rather common.
In the pre-internet age, if you wanted a specific kind of antique, you had to go on a physical expedition to find it. This meant jumping in your car or taking public transportation to a physical antique store, an antiques mall or maybe a flea market. But this was always a very limited method that relied heavily on random luck to discover the antique you wanted.
There are a finite number of physical antique dealers within any geographical area. In addition, even an ambitious shopper will find there is a hard limit on the number of antique stores that can reasonably be explored in a day – probably on the order of 4 to 6 locations.
Of course, an antique collector operating in the pre-internet age was also constrained by the inventory the dealers near him chose to carry. This might be influenced by industry trends and regional tastes. In short, in the pre-internet age there was a lot less antique inventory to choose from and luck-of-the-draw was either your best friend or your worst enemy.
The dawning of the internet age changed all of that. The rise of platforms like eBay and Ruby Lane suddenly made massive numbers of antiques available to collectors, connoisseurs and decorators. This was a major step forward for the antiques industry.
However, the advent of the internet age also had a dark side. It revealed that dozens of different categories of antiques and collectibles previously believed to be scarce were, in reality, common – sometimes very common! Vintage toys, glassware, memorabilia and china are just a few of the antique categories that were revealed to be far more prevalent than previously thought.
Some specific sub-categories, such as Roseville Pottery, carnival glass and Hummel figurines, had their market prices absolutely decimated by this revelation. This antiques message board with a thread titled “What has happened to the pottery market?” paints a sobering picture of the current marketplace for pottery, but the concepts are equally applicable to many other collectible categories. It is hard to get excited about a collectible when it is possible to surf over to eBay and bring up 10,000 similar results with just a simple search.
Not everything is doom and gloom in the world of antiques, though. The rise of the internet age has created a little-appreciated silver lining for antique aficionados. If you search the major online platforms – the eBays, Ruby Lanes and Etsys of the world – for an antique and can only come up with a few dozen examples, then that is a good indicator that the piece in question is fairly scarce.
This might seem like a self-evident observation, but I can assure you that the antiques market hasn’t quite caught up with the philosophical implications of this epiphany yet. You can think of the major online antique platforms as a giant international flea market. Absolutely every antique imaginable is represented on these websites.
They are effectively the aggregated antique inventory of the entire world. Yes, there are undoubtedly additional specimens hiding in attics and basements across the globe, but the antiques currently available online still number in the millions, if not tens of millions!
This means that the term “rare” before the late 1990s referred to a piece that might or might not have actually been rare, depending on local collector or dealer preferences and regional availability. In contrast, in our current internet age rare means that an antique is really, truly, exceptional rare. Seriously, if you have trouble finding more than a handful of examples of an item today with the considerable power of Google at your fingertips, it is highly unlikely the situation will dramatically change in the future.
This phenomenon isn’t strictly limited to antiques either. We live in an age of mass production, but if you’re willing to look for them, there are some beautifully handmade items out there that I refer to as “future antiques“. These are objects that were made recently, but have been made to the highest standards by skilled craftsmen using the best quality materials available.
These future antiques will assuredly age into incredibly fine and desirable antiques after a few decades have passed. In addition, they are often unique specimens – an element of supreme importance when you consider that we live in a world overrun by mass produced, made in China junk. For example, I recently featured an artisan carved contemporary nephrite jade pendant in the Spotlight section of my website. Another great future antique I highlighted was a contemporary drypoint print by the artist Mariko Kuzumi.
But the best part about the fact that the antiques community hasn’t figured out how rarity works in the internet age is the prices! You can currently snatch up really great items for unbelievably low prices – oftentimes just a few hundred dollars or even less. But one day the antiques market will figure out the way the new scarcity game works, so don’t wait to make your move!
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