Automobilia Anemia
Hi Friends!
Earlier this week, I had a very interesting conversation with a client. To give you a little background on this gentleman, he is a bonafide collector. He has a number of collector cars, has owned a ton more, stockpiles photographs, documents, automobilia, parts, all of it. If you can collect it, he’s got it.
Recently, he was in attendance at one of the more important Concours events in this country, when he recognized a car that he had previously owned. The car in question was a gentleman racer type of road car and although not incredibly significant, it was still a valuable, reasonably one of a kind, known car that was attracting attention. He hung around the car for a little bit in hopes of trying to have a chat with the owner, when a gentleman approached in his late ’40s or early ’50s and indicated that the car was currently under his custodianship.
My client introduced himself and relayed that a few decades earlier, he had also owned the car and had performed what was likely the most recent body-off restoration that the car had received. He also told the younger gentleman that he had a fairly large amount of pre-restoration parts and photos and documentation from the restoration that he had performed, that he was willing to pass along free of charge. To his shock, the new owner quickly and sharply replied that he had “no interest in anything like that”. “The car is right here” he said. “Why would I care about any of that stuff?”.
My client was admittedly shocked by this. As a guy that’s been around for quite a while, shown cars virtually everywhere and knows what it takes to build Concours winning automobiles, the idea that you wouldn’t want to put together a full and complete package that would properly represent the car above and beyond potential competitors seemed totally insane to him. Additionally, he said that because of the historical significance of these cars, they deserve to have things like that that accompany them. Needless to say, he was really disappointed in this interaction.
To be perfectly honest, I was also, but this is absolutely not the first time I’ve heard a story like this. In fact, I’ve been hearing several of them and all pretty recently.
From what I can tell, a lot of incoming, next generation type collectors are looking at this hobby really differently than the people that they’re following in. For them it’s about access, networking and personal/professional affirmation and less about the cars themselves. They buy these cars under the assumption that they are a golden ticket to get into the social circles that this hobby can oftentimes provide. The thing is, they’re not wrong (but at the same time, they still kind of are).
No more than 24 hours after I had this conversation, I get a press release in my inbox from Pauline Pechakjian, Publicity Manager at Gooding Christie’s announcing their upcoming Geared Online Spring Automobilia sale. As I flipped through the initial preview list of items on the website, it’s clear that there’s some really high-quality things on offer from numerous known, detailed and thoroughly curated collections. It’s also pretty clear that a lot of this stuff is really important to protect and that sales like this, pushing things like this, are equally as critical and maybe one of the best tools we have available to curve what appears to be this rather disturbing new trend. Sales like this obviously strive to present these items in a beautiful light with exciting and interesting background information and although the idea here is to enhance the sales process, I think there may be an even more important side to it: They may have the ability to get these people excited about these items and to understand and respect them as well.
There will always be people entering into this hobby that are here primarily for the access it can provide. That is certainly one of the features of being here. Again however, the love of the automobile and the dedication to the preservation of history should always be at least a few steps higher on the ladder than that.
It would be really tragic to let those two things change places and it seems like (at least at certain levels), we’re in real danger of that happening.
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge
