Valuing the value-transcendent
I watch Antiques Roadshow. I can usually only stomach the original, British version, not the horrid American knock-off. Frequently someone will bring in a family piece — say, a portrait of a relative from Georgian times, or a needlework sampler that a greatn-grandmother composed in the early 19th Century C.E. — and will ask after its value.
Now, establishing an auction value makes sense for these: that establishes what items like it, in comparable condition, fetch to when sold to someone else with an interest in art. But the valuers will go on to give a higher value for insurance purposes, which is supposed to be a “replacement value”.
Replacement? What could that possibly mean? Surely you aren’t going to go out and find another portrait of your ancestor, right? Another sampler that a distant forebear created? No, it probably means a contemporary of what you have — a portrait of someone else, or a sampler by someone else.
This baffles me. Why bother? If it’s Revere Silver, and there are other, more-or-less identical items on the market, “replacement value” make sense. But the literally irreplaceable, the one-of-a-kind items? When they’re gone, they’re gone.
My former boss (Jeff, if you’re reading, it was your father) once talked to me about an insurance agent approaching him about insuring his children. He was likewise dumbfounded. As he saw it, the argument seemed to be that, if his child died, it would take a lot of money to make up for it. This is nonsense. There is not a figure (in dollars) I would accept in exchange for Niall — there may not even be a figure in lives I would exchange for his. That’s not big-U Utilitarian, but it is how I think. Heirlooms like the cassette tapes that my family recorded for my Nana, which I now have safely in my possession and will be encoding to digital form, don’t make sense to insure. There is no accounting for ancestry. de la Rocha lyrics come to mind: “Sell your history for a VCR.” No thanks. You keep your VCR, I’ll keep my heirlooms, please.
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March 12th, 2008 at 12:42 am
Oh, and the prices quoted for two hundred year-old children’s needlepoint samplers? What is going on there? Thousands? Ten grand? Insane! There’s a bubble that’s going to burst soon…