Antiques - the original green choice

By Sylvia Vetta

The media, websites and blogs urge us to recycle. Recycling is good but it is not the the best way to be green. Reusing is more environmentally friendly than recycling which requires energy. When I was Chairman of the Thames Valley Art and Antiques Dealers Association (TVADA) 1998- 2001, I suggested we create the logo ‘Antiques are Green’. TVADA did not take up that suggestion but they did run with my idea for a road sign. The traders’ choice was elegant but the Department of Transport didn’t like it – they preferred an uninspiring candelabra.

Fashions swing like a pendulum. My parents’ generation wanted everything new. In 1967, when Atam and I began to furnish our first home on £50, I searched the second-hand shops to find unfashionable bargains. By the 80s and 90s my buys had become desirable and risen in value over twenty times.

My first career was in teaching. In 1981when my academic husband Dr Atam Vetta had a sabbatical in the States, I saw flea markets in the malls at the weekends. When we returned I started the first monthly flea markets in Oxford. With a partner I founded Oxford Antiques Omnibus, a twice weekly market, followed by Oxford’s first Antique Centre in what had been Coopers Oxford Marmalade factory which we named The Jam Factory. This started to happen elsewhere too. My friend Ray Foulk started Kingston Antiques Centre around the same time. Ray is best known for Stealing Dylan from Woodstock because he founded the Isle of Wight festivals. Ray was an early enthusiast for Art Deco and supplied several items for a prestigious Art Deco exhibition in the V&A. I recently compered the launch of his and his daughter Caroline’s first novel Picasso’s Revenge which is about the shocking Demoiselles d’Avingnon and the collector who bought it.

Will collecting return? It was a habit that laid the foundations of knowledge and science but now we live in a digital world. Antiques went out of fashion when IKEA and minimalism became the rage for my children’s generation. My guess is that the next generation will look with fresh eyes on the creations of the past and want to reuse rather than recycle. I can’t see young people moving away from modern storage solutions but dining tables, desks, and chairs? The Georgians were fairly minimalistic but also achingly elegant. Art Deco is cheerful and Arts and Crafts philosophically right for today’s world. I hope they value high quality ceramics and glass too.

There is one place in the world where antiques are booming – China. Why is that? This magazine kindly supported the launch of my first novel Brushstrokes in Time which was inspired by three years of in depth interviews with Stars Art Movement founder Qu Leilei who lives in Wimbledon. The artist, his family and friends told me about their experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Young people were urged to destroy the old and they did. Collectors in the West had acquired valuable items and now the Chinese want them back. Once you lose something you value it.

My love of antiques is combined with my love of story – telling. For 20 years I wrote for various magazines. Every month in 2006 I wrote a series I called ‘Every Antique Tells a Story’. I began it with the story of a pair of damaged soft paste vases and the mystery behind them. Dr Christopher Brown, the then director of the Ashmolean liked the series and I believe it inspired a brilliant exhibition outside the world’s first public museum when it was being rebuilt. I would not be surprised if his friend Neil MacGregor had not liked the idea too because ‘A History of the World in a Hundred Objects’ opened 4 years after my series.

My second novel Sculpting the Elephant is informed by my life experiences in a mixed marriage and thirty years of experience in the world of art and antiques. My protagonist Harry King is an artist. It’s tough earning a living as an artist, actor or writer! Harry opens a shop called Deco-rators which specialises in 20th century design where he can also sell his paintings. Yes he paints and draws! Like me he appreciates original conceptual art but sketching is a compulsion for him. I hope he can be an inspiration for a new generation to appreciate the past, present and future.