Description: From smashed bottle caps to 20th-century design.

Question: When did collecting art first spark your interest?

Transcript: I first started collecting smashed bottle caps in the fifth grade. There is a supermarket in the town of Mendham, New Jersey where I grew up. And my mom would get, you know, quite ticked off at me because I would kind of dart in between the station wagons and look for, like, smashed Heineken caps. And so I put together this kind of like very obsessive, in alphabetical order by the beer name, collection of mashed caps. And I considered myself lucky when I convinced my dad to buy like a six-pack of some imported beer so I could take, like, the mint cap and replaced the smashed cap with the mint cap. So bottle caps led to baseball cards; which led to antique bottles, which is still an obsession of mine; collecting insulators from the tops of telephone poles. And it just kind of mutated from there.

Question: What drew you to design?

Transcript: I think it’s a combination of I can still relate to aspects of my field; as opposed to if I was an art historian who was then becoming an old master painting specialist or an impressionist painting specialist. I think a lot of it has to do with price and value. It’s still conceivable to build a design collection today and not spend more than a couple thousand dollars tops for certain pieces. It’s still quote conceivable to go to museum shops around the world and put together a very challenging, avant garde collection of the latest in contemporary design just based on what those shops sell. In paintings you’re so far removed in terms of value. It’s . . . I think _________ there’s some sort of, you know, what I live with, and what I sleep on, and what I collect isn’t what I sell for the most part at auction, but there’s definitely some connection there.

Question: How do you prepare for a career in the field if you are not a designer?

Transcript: Well I certainly don’t want to turn this into some, like, negative, anti-grad school diatribe. But I do feel as though a simple, strong art history bachelors degree from a good liberal arts college where you can take architectural history courses, history courses, studio art and design courses, as well as of course classic kind of Jansen 101, history of western art is your fundamental basis of becoming an executive in the auction house industry, or in the design field like myself. Grad school didn’t really add much to the equation for me. I found myself, you know, agonizing over the semiotics of some Trompe L’oeil painting from 1870, and how I could write something fresh and new. And it was just . . . I was lost after a certain point.

In grad school, however, you know you’re frequently encouraged, of course, to pursue internships at museums, and galleries, and auction houses. And I did my share. I’ve spent time interning everywhere from the Akron Art Museum in Ohio to the Metropolitan in their American paintings department. And I was offered the opportunity to take the train in from Rutgers where I was going to school to Sotheby’s in 1995. And I interned in a department that was just specializing in doing appraisals, and I caught that vibe there that made me start to think that maybe my chosen calling wasn’t the pure professorial academic side, but was more the merchant side of it all. And so one thing led to another really for me.

My first years I worked at Christie’s in the late 1990s. And at the time I kind of . . . I’ve always wanted to develop little micro markets within the field of 20th century design. And for a brief period from 1997 to 1998, I curated several sales of ocean liner furnishings and memorabilia, which is an exceptionally narrow market. If you’re dealing with, you know, two or three famous ocean liners in an altogether too small cult of followers, you’re not going to produce a catalog more than once or twice a decade. But I had my sale at the same time as Titanic the movie came out, and I had several original Morse code, SOS signals that were sent out from the Titanic and were recorded as Marconi signals, they were called, by other surrounding vessels in the ocean at the time. And so these kind of like, “We’ve hit an iceberg. Help!” kind of moments were the kind of things that memorabilia collectors go for. And the timing was right, and I found myself doing live interviews with the BBC radio network in London and appearing on television in Hong Kong. It was like one of those kinds of moments where as a 28 or 29 year old, it was just like my big moment. And I started to realize then the role of pop culture and the media in shaping the auction house industry over the last 10 years.

Recorded on: 1/30/08