Cannons: a tale of wealth, property, art and patronage

At Timon’s Villa let us pass a day,
Where all cry out, ‘What sums are thrown away!’
So proud, so grand, of that stupendous air,
Soft and Agreeable come never there.
Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught
As brings all Brobdignag before your thought.
To compass this, his building is a Town,
His pond an Ocean, his parterre a Down:
Who but must laugh, the Master when he sees,
A punt insect, shriv’ring at a breeze!
Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!
The whole, a labour’d Quarry above ground.
Two Cupids squirt before: a Lake behind
Improves the keenness of the Northern wind.
His Gardens next your admiration call,
On ev’ry side you look, behold the Wall!
No pleasing Intricacies intervene,
No artful wildness to perplex the scene;
Grove nods at grove, each Alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
The suff’ring eye inverted nature sees,
Trees cut to Statues, Statues thick as trees,
With here a Fountain, never to be play’d,
And there a Summer-house, that knows no shade;
Here Amphritite sails thro’ myrtle bow’rs;
There Gladiators fight, or die, in flow’rs;
Un-water’d see the drooping sea-horse mourn,
And swallows roost in Nilus’ dusty urn.

In his description of Timon’s Villa, Pope was popularly thought to be satirising Cannons, the stately home of James Brydges, first duke of Chandos. It was apparently, not the case, but it is easy to see how the misapprehension arose.

Brydges must be remembered as the patron of ‘the great and good Mr Handel’ and as one of the supporters of the Foundling Hospital established by Thomas Coram, but other aspects of his career are less acceptable to modern tastes.

He acquired vast wealth during the War of the Spanish Succession in his role as Paymaster General of the British forces. Such corruption was objected to at the time mostly for its scale.

In 1713 Brydges, later created first duke of Chandos, to add to his titles of 9th Baron Chandos, 1st Viscount Wilton and 1st Earl of Carnarvon, set about creating a stately home and estate of unparalleled magnificence at Cannons, in Little Stanmore, Middlesex, now more recognised as an outlying station on London Transport’s Jubilee Line.

The project took him eleven years and cost over twenty-seven and a half million pounds in today’s terms. Like any oligarch, he ran through several architects, including some of the most prominent at the time, and ended up completing things under the supervision of his own surveyors.

Grounds, house and contents were all exceptional for their scale, richness and grandeur. Aquatic engineering was taken to new heights and works by Titian, Giorgione, Raphael, Poussin, Caravaggio and Guernico were to be found in the house. In an age when oligarchs regarded their privacy differently from now and, without television, or an illustrated popular press, they had to achieve their celebrity by other means, Cannons was visited by the public in vast numbers, quite like any National Trust star property today. I don’t think the duke sold tea towels. He is said to have contemplated building a private road across his private lands all the way from Stanmore to his never completed London town house in Cavendish Square.

But by 1720 the duke was in trouble, and lost much of his fortune following the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. The South Sea Company is now commonly thought of as a trading company whose stock valuation became ludicrously over valued on the market. We tend to regard it, along with tulip mania, as a kind of bizarrely naïve financial exuberance that we have put well behind us. It is true that the stock both rose and fell tenfold in the course of a single year in 1720, but the company, although ostensibly a trading company, was principally established for the purpose of trading in government debt, as a direct consequence of the expense of the War of the Spanish Succession – it would nowadays presumably be regarded as shadow banking – and its failure resulted from the circular artificiality of its strategies for achieving that. The situation was worsened by outright fraud and corrupt interweaving of private financial and government interests.

The Brydges family fortunes never recovered, and in 1747, three years after the first duke’s death, his son found the estate so hopelessly encumbered with debt that grounds, house and contents were put up for piecemeal, demolition sale. Little now remains apart from some of the major landscape features of the grounds. Bits of the fabric went to churches, galleries or other grand houses (our old friend and would-be patron of lexicographers, Lord Chesterfield – he of the letters to his son – took the portico, railings and marble staircase with bronze balustrade for his new London house).

The estate itself was purchased by the cabinet-maker William Hallett who in 1760 built a large villa on the site which today houses the North London Collegiate School – so at least furniture-makers come creditably out of the episode.

Brands

The Hands of Jobs

An American company, owned by our very own dearly beloved WPP, has just released its annual ‘global brand power list’, where Apple has shot to the top of a scale that estimates brand value on the basis of such key metrics as ‘desirability’ and ‘buzz’. (Somehow you can tell this is the work of an advertising company, but I think money’s in there somewhere too.)

BP of course (wrong kind of buzz) has slumped to number 64 – do we still love it?

The top of the list is dominated by the commuter and communications world – not just Apple but Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Vodafone, IBM and not forgetting China Mobile – with a strong showing also from staff-of-life companies, MacDonald’s, Coca Cola, Walmart and Marlboro, and a sprinkling of lightweights such as GE.

Many of these brands of course, like WPP itself, share internationally creative taxation practices.

Our own Furniture Designer Makers’ Association doesn’t seem to have made it into the top hundred – perhaps because we haven’t sorted out our logo yet.

The Hands of God and Man

The cutting edge of luxury

 

Furniture designer-makers anxiously and interminably fret about their commercial viability, their social responsibility, and look to their new association to make them rich and famous (whilst keeping them ethical and sustainable).

It would repay us to reflect on an account of a commercially highly successful sector of the retail trade in the UK published in today's Observer. At first sight, we are the polar opposites of women's high-street fashion, but we live and work in the same world. Is that the globalised world?

A brand too far

Furniture designer-makers – well, British ones, mostly – well, some of them – have been busily changing their association into something more ‘outward-looking’ that will make them much better known, and much better off. DMOU becomes FDMA. It has taken more than two years of discussion and debate and some people – well, me anyway – regret that the open and fluid character of the old association will be lost for no actual gain. So this is a post only for furniture designer-makers and those with a direct interest in such things.

The association will certainly have to change the ‘About Us’ page on its website.

Now we have a committee, whereas before we prided ourselves that we did not, and it takes its first small steps into brand definition with a quest for a Iogo. To what extent, I wonder, is it possible to advance the interests of all members by the promotion of a single FDMA ‘brand’?

Members get touchy at being differentiated from other members, at least at the upper end of the spectrum, but we cannot sensibly ignore the fact that, having already taken our association down the road of ‘inclusiveness’, our membership embraces a very wide range of work.

Of course the FDMA can say, ‘At whatever level you wish to acquire a piece of furniture you can find a small independent designer-maker who can provide you with something individual and satisfying.’ But that’s hardly compulsive promotion. As soon as the promotion tries to be more effective it has to concentrate on some differentiated particulars. Can we really advance the fortunes of --- --- and --- --- in a single breath? Do we all sell to the same market? I think it is difficult to answer ‘yes’; the membership as a whole just does not constitute, in a commercially meaningful sense, a single ‘brand’. We do have a, rather frayed, ‘philosophical’ identity as ‘designer-makers’, but, although that is real, I do not think it will be much called upon in commercial promotion: it is sometimes difficult to get our membership to understand it, let alone the buying public.

There are some members scarcely involved in one-off commissions; there are great disparities of scale (some members head companies that employ around 40 people, others are one-person, or even half-person bands); enormous variation in the character of ‘artistic’ approach; there are members concentrating just on particular types of furniture; and so on. But the most obvious disparity is in – I struggle to find a word that expresses what we all recognise without giving offence – ‘sophistication’? ‘refinement’? ‘originality’? maybe just ‘expense’. Not all our members can meaningfully offer to inlay their client’s coat of arms into their purchase. A few of our members have achieved almost ‘heritage’ status, actively admired by a section of the public who cannot possibly aspire to own a piece of it. You have only to look at the published results of successful PR about our work, with that vulgar or pretentious vacuousness that so often characterises it, to see that we cannot blithely ignore unwanted externalities in constructing our promotion. These are marketing facts. The world is not about to change, even if we are.

So, ill equipped as we are to direct the public attention with any developed distinguishing discourse of our own about our work, we focus it (or allow it to be focussed) on the small group of individuals whose work we know, from experience, provokes the readiest response, a small group selected by the even smaller group that runs the project, one perhaps not completely distinct from our (non)-executive committee. So FDMA becomes a successful public brand; we have created stars, or at least buffed up our existing ones – but is it a successful association?

Once an identity of structure and an identity of brand are adopted they require, for their effective functioning, an identity of membership, and one will be acquired and imposed by process and practice if it is not chosen by discussion and consensus.

The question of our identity needs answering not only in deciding what to do in defining FDMA as such, but also in forming the relationship between individual projects and the FDMA ‘brand’. It is difficult to see that most marketing or promotional projects will not be slanted towards the ‘upper’ echelons of one-off commission work. I don’t mean exclusively so, but, given our inability to select or characterise our work by any criterion beyond a general and unarticulated notion of excellence or expressiveness (to award it a Guildmark so to speak), it seems all the more likely. That is the easiest sector to promote; those are the members most likely to have the resources, the time, the money and the appetite to support projects; that is the territory from which the FDMA idea sprang and it is quite prominent in the committee make-up.

In that way FDMA will become ‘aspirational’: with people joining expecting to serve a long apprenticeship before they can hope to participate fully in the tangible benefits of membership. That is not how DMOU/FDMA has presented itself to designer-makers hitherto, and it is not, in my view, a sustainable format for the association.

I am not suggesting there are dark forces at work here, or that this is the exclusive character of FDMA’s likely development, but I do think it is a real danger that, over time, after the initial enthusiasm, a significant body of members (including some who voted for FDMA) will come to see FDMA (with some justification) as benefiting mainly those ‘upper echelons’, those who, to their minds, least need it.

They will say nothing at first and so, in that sense, the association and its discussion forum will appear undivided. But the resentment will grow, and from time to time break out in fractious and slightly them-and-us. This is the classic path of broad-based but formalised ‘professional’ associations, especially those (and FDMA is quite likely to join their ranks) where membership is seen as essential for professional advancement.

All the talk now of course is of success, democracy and solidarity, but this minority will feel more and more ignored and become less and less inclined to take any part in the association, and so sets in its slow decline, or else its conversion into (or supplanting by) a more frankly selective and ‘aspirational’ body.

The more our committee tries to define the single FDMA ‘brand’, moving on past logos, thinking they are being ‘inclusive’, the worse it will become, because it can only be a pretence that all our interests are served by a single kind of promotion and FDMA will become effectively identified with the kind of work that is easiest to promote. It is our own backyard globalisation, our surrender to the deracinated concept of the ‘world-class’, where creativity is validated not by the individual, rooted imagination but by general commercial endorsement – a concentration on the kind of furniture whose market depends upon a globalised, high-input, low resource-cost, high wealth-polarisation economy, which, it seems to me is what the Guildmark culture links into. We are in danger of adopting a cult of mindless excellence, complete with its own external identifiers. DMOU/FDMA, despite in practice always veering towards inclusiveness over any individual membership application, has already, in its outward pronouncements, begun slipping down that slope by putting first, in its list of indicators for potential members to use in pre-assessing themselves, awards, selection for particular exhibitions, and membership of other groups.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as I fear; maybe we’ll just rub along with nothing terribly remarkable being achieved for any of us. So that we all stay a little disappointed, but no-one gets resentful of others. I doubt it, but, if we want to maintain a broad association more than we want to achieve substantial advantage for just a section of it, that may be the best we can hope for, unless we take radical and determined steps to disaggregate the FDMA commercial ‘brand’ and get back to our original vision.

Where are we in the world?

I recently initiated a thread on the furniture designer-makers forum to which I subscribe trying to identify our place in the wider social and economic currents swirling around us. This, I suppose, was the heart of it:

It can hardly be denied that 'We make expensive objects that few can afford'; that even our batch produced furniture needs a more than average level of disposable income; and that many of us are uncomfortable with that - just as William Morris was all that time ago.

Long ago our society and economy got to the point where no ordinary person could afford the fruits of 'hand production', except for very small items and the repair of important technologically produced goods, like fixing our cars. Yet even there the range of those mass produced items that it is 'economic' to repair by individual labour rather than just buy a new one is, as we all notice, shrinking rapidly, and many are explicitly manufactured in a way that means it is impossible to take them apart without destroying them. (How many of us incidentally have any concern for the possibility of taking our furniture apart non-destructively in decades to come?)

And things have moved on, so that here most people cannot afford even mass-produced objects unless the relatively low labour content they still require comes from third-world workers, whom we regard with an uncomfortable mixture of guilt that we are exploiting them, and moral self-approbation that we are 'lifting them out of poverty'. (Never mind that we are also lifting them out of their own cultures, and we usually put aside the thought that once we have so lifted them the added burden on the world's resources will become truly insupportable.)

And things are moving on still further, so that the globalised economy is moving towards an end where generally labour will be unable to earn sufficient money to purchase its own product and wealth becomes increasingly invested in assets of inflating value rather than in productive industry. This is, as far as I understand it, the collapse of our economy that some people predict through a combination of simultaneous inflation in one area and deflation in another.

The one indispensible item for us all where a relatively high element of hand labour is difficult to eliminate or outsource to the third world is our houses, which have inflated to a value where they become a life-time burden on our personal earnings and a key asset prop of the whole unstable financial/economic system, ripe (or over-ripe) for corruption by those who believe they can manipulate the system for their own advantage.

My point is that, however morally aware and troubled we are, it is a difficult treadmill to step off.

You are right too that we attach tags to our furniture to redeem it. 'Green' is one of the most common, but some time ago Barnaby pointed out that the carbon footprint of a small workshop was likely to compare very unfavourably with that of larger production. So we concentrate on how sustainably we source our raw materials and gloss over the sustainability of our whole operation, let alone the fact that a large proportion of our sustainable timber ends up in the dust extractor.

'Heirloom' is perhaps safer if we just mean that we expect our furniture to out-last us and we hope it will still be valued by succeeding generations. Yet we have to steer clear of meaning 'value' in any monetary sense, because when our furniture does reach the resale market it commands pretty miserable prices, and, in the 'antique' market generally it is only a very few outstanding and 'collectible' items that attract high prices, and the vast bulk of well designed and made furniture from the past sells for low prices in the sense that no-one today could possibly make it from scratch so cheaply.

That is a reflection of the nature of the asset market that characterises the wealthiest end of our society and economy, and what is, I think, most ethically uncomfortable for us as designer-makers is a tendency to aspire in our work to the trappings of that level of luxury. Mostly the hope is vain, but it results in very expensive furniture with a very high level of finish and a sophistication verging on the absurd, a rarified claim to be taking our product to unprecedented, never before thought of heights. (And here we break ranks with our Arts and Crafts predecessors.) That sort of approach of course finds willing allies in the ranks of professional marketers and promoters, publicists and even 'critics', and maybe associations. It is inimical to any more culturally distinct or articulated characterisation of a body of craft or art work. Historically, work that has been so characterised has often met, initially, with surprise, incomprehension or hostility from the contemporary market - which is not what our new association is aiming at.

Between the Tides

Some thoughts on what distinguishes designer-maker furniture and its position in our economy and culture

Furniture designer-makers tend to be uneasy about the relatively high prices they have to ask for their work. They would like it to be widely accessible, not so much for commercial reasons but because of the relationship they would like to see themselves having to wider society. In that little has changed since the days of William Morris.


Mostly, our customers, although not without disposable income, tend not to come from the super-rich. Those who are serious about the acquisition of wealth have neither the time nor the stomach for the risks of commissioning individually designed furniture, unvalidated by the market or received opinion. Look at the pictures of the interior of One Hyde Park, designed by Lord Rogers for the Candy brothers developers and recently celebrated as the most expensive London perch at £6000 a square something or other. Luxury perhaps, but design originality no.

One Hyde Park: the cutting edge of design?

We should be grateful that our customers are people committed to individual engagement with small designers and makers, but they are not immune to the strains of the Candy-coloured economy that is enveloping us. In the US, economic commentary increasingly remarks on the trickle (or perhaps stream) up. Maserati sales are booming; Lexus in serious decline, as the company loses sales on what one analyst calls 'the lower edge of luxury'.

GM HQ Detroit: the lower edge of luxury?

Few now subscribe to the idea of the rising tide lifting all boats. The idea that we are distinguished by the size of our boats, but that otherwise we all bob around quite unconstrained on a pond of equal opportunity seems to me bizarre. We exist and operate in a complex network of circumstances, relationships and mutual assumptions – social, economic, political, cultural, material – that partly and unequally determines our ability to respond to changed external circumstances. One needs to examine and perhaps alter that network as well as try to influence or recognise the changes in external circumstances. Indeed the two are not actually separate.

Our work as furniture designer-makers differs not just in its individuality but in its type. Some among us produce collectable furniture, furniture without a back, furniture that might seem more comfortable on a plinth as a sculptural object than against a mundane domestic wall. Unsurprisingly, this is the furniture that gets noticed: it is within at least occasional hailing distance of that ‘unusable, unaffordable and, preferably, unmakeable’ furniture so beloved of the press and critics (and whose creators would not dream of aligning themselves with any of the restrictive categories of ‘furniture’, ‘designer’ or ‘maker’).

Indirectly, this collectable furniture benefits us all: in the minds of some of our customers it effectively validates what we do on a humbler plane. How many of us have not seen a questioner’s brow clear when they say, ‘So, your work is like so-and-so’s’, naming some more celebrated member of our ranks? Yet it is a mixed blessing: it brings us work but, unless we challenge it outright, we may find it difficult to distance ourselves far from it. We may feel we have to keep up, or at least not fall too far behind, as it moves towards ever grander plinths. It also brings some risk of squeezing out humbler work from publication, exhibition selection and so on.

Things are not helped by our collective unsureness as to what are the primary qualities that we are selling with our furniture: and the public falls back to the default option of ‘antiques of the future’. Is it an intimate relationship with wood; is it craft, design, art; or is it a ‘bespoke’ service to answer highly particular practical needs? They are all qualities that we frequently invoke, but equally they all have limitations against which we sometimes feel compelled to protest. In a crude and unrigorous survey of the catalogue to an exhibition in which I participated in 2010 I found the following frequency to some key qualities: ‘commission/bespoke’ 19, ‘unique’ 14, ‘craft’ 14, ‘design’ 12, ‘beauty’ 12, ‘wood’ 11, ‘awards/prizes’ 8, ‘heritage/generations/timeless’ 8, ‘environment/sustainability’ 6, ‘tradition’ 2. They were not always (but were mostly) the actual words used – I was surprised how often ‘beauty’ occurred. Maybe I’ve missed some: there were a few references to functionality, but no-one mentioned modern technology or its capabilities.

Is it originality and uniqueness that we aim for? It comes second in my survey and there are some very bold claims within the catalogue to the current Millinery Works exhibition, not so much to be pushing the boundaries but to be stepping right outside them. (But a severe critic might say that when we do step outside the boundaries it is more a matter of distance than new direction.) Do such claims stand up? Is that what we should be doing? The early 21st century would be an unprecedented period of cultural innovation if we were. Or are we working within and developing a broad cultural movement, as furniture-makers before us have mostly done? Are we truly developing, as the exhibition claimed, the ‘Arts and Crafts legacy’? Do we truly know what it is? 'Tradition', T.S. Eliot wrote, 'cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.'

Eliot had much of interest to say about artistic or cultural tradition that provides a useful antidote to our tendency to regard ‘traditional’ work as simply doing what has been done before, and ‘innovative’ work as the more valuable the less it has any connection with anything that has been done before. Eliot regarded cultural tradition as something more complex and dynamic than an all-pervading ether that we inhale involuntarily. It makes little sense that art which we struggle to comprehend when new should by the simple passage of years become something that we can apprehend without effort. Eliot thought that cultural tradition could only be apprehended fully through creative or critical/appreciative effort and that, in making such an effort we do not simply repeat what has gone before, but bring our own individual variation to its realisation, so creating a living tradition and changing, to a degree, the work of the past as well as that of the present. By such changes he did not mean the kind of ‘boundary breaking’ innovation that we frequently extol, but he did recognise that a culture could at times become stultifying rather than sustaining to the individuals who shared it – ‘So positive was the culture of that age [the eighteenth century] that it crushed a number of smaller men who thought differently but could not bear to face the fact’. He recognised that, as changes in sensibility and circumstances accumulate or accelerate, a culture periodically reaches a point where artistic expression has to change decisively to maintain its functioning viability: ‘Sensibility alters in us all from age to age whether we will or no, but expression is only changed by a man of genius.’ That genius he thought lay in artistic skill, not in intensity of personal vision. In fact, perhaps for reasons peculiar to his own personality, he was intensely hostile to allowing personality any role in artistic achievement: ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ He believed that any artistic expression was, by its nature, a collaborative enterprise, and he was surely right in thinking that if art is great simply according to the intensity and uniqueness of the artist’s individual vision it becomes of interest to the rest of us just as spectacle or the object of shallow emulation, precluding his concept of a creative tradition.

Arts and Crafts furniture is at least then potentially an enormous element in our cultural inheritance whether we acknowledge, ignore or reject it, but I see little evidence that we are carrying it forward in any recognisable form overall. Some pieces in an earlier exhibition that appeared at first sight to relate most to Arts and Crafts had some pretty un-Arts and Crafts construction beneath.

Yet, for a sign of our times, if one looks at the website of the Society of Designer Craftsmen, which makes much of its direct descent from Walter Crane’s and William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, one finds it proclaiming ‘Innovation, originality and quality are seen as integral elements of our work…we look for people who design and make original, beautiful, exciting, challenging works…we expect members to have a strong and innovative design sense…’ I’ve added the italics to point out the particular flavour of their advocacy. I’m in favour of those qualities myself, but is there not a degree of imbalance here? (How much excitement can one take in one’s dining table?) All that reiteration comes within a few sentences. It’s not exactly how Morris would have written: Morris, Gimson, the Barnsleys and others of the Arts and Crafts movement were innovative but were also keen to draw strength from aspects of tradition. Ironically the SDC goes on to say ‘We don’t accept work that is confined within the past tradition’. It’s not quite clear what they mean by that rather tortured phrase, or whether they’re referring to their own Arts and Crafts tradition – is that only to be invoked positively when considering the society as an organisation? Is tradition an in animate object? Perhaps it’s a polite way of saying ‘reproduction’; anyway, they don’t seem to have read much Eliot, and their words are, I think, symptomatic of the way in which we now give a reductive meaning to ‘tradition’ and regard it as excluding ‘innovation’, rather than seeing the two as interactive. It is also I think a little shaming that a society, descended from nineteenth-century artists and writers who thought deeply about culture and society, should show so little evidence of serious thought about artistic tradition but opt instead for something more akin to repetitive marketing-speak.

The curators of the designer-maker exhibitions to which I refer, struggle to give us a specific, positive identity as a group (far less write us a manifesto) and fall back to ‘it may not look like a movement but….’ Is our ultimate identity only a matter of superlatives?

Collectively, we seem able to ignore scarcely any furniture-making virtue of the past 150 years: the elegance of a Ruhlmann, the robustness of a Lutyens, the truth to materials of a Barnsley, the new materials of a Breuer, the simplicity of the Shakers, the decoration of a Bugatti, the flowing curves of a Guimard, the sculptural forms of a Gaudi, the linearity of a Gray, the innovation of a Rietveld, the tradition of a … well, there I’m lost for an immediate recent exemplar. But what other quality does our work not seem to lay claim to somewhere?

Are we, in the terms of one exhibition catalogue, striving to imbue our furniture with ‘expressive existence’ or is the creative process less singly driven, so that it attains its end when it embodies a state where intellectual and emotional satisfaction are indistinguishable? A large demand on a small canvass, but I have encountered a few such pieces of furniture (including a Barnsley piece). Perhaps it is a possible defining quality of ‘applied’ art that it seeks to resolve tensions, whilst ‘fine’ art need not.

If, in search of common ground beneath all our work, we say, as this catalogue does, that ‘workmanship’ is a ‘given’, although it words and places the idea carefully, we run some risk of again reinforcing that ‘antiques of the future’ preconception; for the public is able to appreciate not so much the inherent skill which can be found unostentatiously in work of many types, but the particular expression of skill that is only possible by taking many hours: high finish, complex jointing methods and detailing, unconventional construction, extravagant forms, wide variation of materials. ‘Ah! So that’, the public thinks, ‘is why it is all so expensive.’

Is there still, in the full sense of the word, a place for ‘respectable’ furniture any more? Are we still able, in our culture, to respect something that is not innovative? If tradition has a specific, realisable meaning for us now we should be. Yet we inhabit a growth-and-progress culture which finds it almost impossible to regard embodying the future as anything but the highest virtue in a new artefact, and, although we can just about consider the possibility of cultural deficit in our obsessive contemplation of the character of each new decade, successive centuries are invariably regarded as inevitable advances, so that ‘21st-century’ glibly replaces ‘20th-century’ as a term of approbation and new hope. The hollowness of our collective cultural analysis is perhaps illustrated by the fact that, at the same time, the revered artworks of the past achieve astronomical monetary values, and, although price levels fluctuate, the work of any individual is hardly ever evicted from the financially approved canon by changes in cultural values and interests – but individual works can be admitted or removed by attribution or de-attribution almost regardless of aesthetic appeal, in something akin to financial re-engineering. It is the function of the ‘criticariat’ to translate the new, the ‘work of the future’ as rapidly as possible into the collected, valued, traded, sanctified ranks of our cultural ‘heritage’. That process is now brought to such a pitch of efficiency that it can be completed within a few years, rather than having to wait for the passing of a generation or the gradual shifting of sensibility (from future to past with minimal lingering in the present), and selected living artists simultaneously (it would seem) both challenge and embody our cultural assumptions. Eat your heart out, Van Gogh. This, in more rarefied form, is the mechanism of ‘antiques of the future’: in our case it works rather more slowly and uncertainly.

We maybe have to accept as designer-makers of furniture that we survive at the margin and sometimes in odd, though possibly moderately comfortable, niches. I hope not, but there are worse fates.