Curious Objects

Latest Episodes:

SPECIAL EPISODE 3: "It feels like being underwater" Apr 01, 2020

Show notes

Ben and Michael, like everyone else, are stuck at home, but they aren’t a pair to shrink from silver linings. For them these include the opportunity to spend time among the beautiful things they've acquired over the years: silver candlesticks, German watercolors, maps, and portrait miniatures. And they’ve got a fate-tempting prediction for the future: “A lot of people are going to come out of this crisis thinking, ‘God, I wish my walls weren’t so white . . . or bare.’”

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SPECIAL EPISODE 2: The Internet to the Rescue Mar 28, 2020

Show notes

Having spent his entire life in and around the antiques trade, dealer David Schorsch has seen it all. In this special episode, he talks with Michael about how the likes of Albert and Harold Sack, Florene Maine, and Ben and Cora Ginsburg weathered the Great Depression, and how this time around, “the Internet could very well be the thing that saves the antiques business.”

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The Mystery of the Michelangelo Bust Mar 25, 2020

Show notes

This month, Ben and Michael speak with Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of prints and drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum. The focus is an odd bronze bust of a crying child—once believed to have been sculpted by Michelangelo—but the trio’s conversation quickly branches out, touching on subjects as diverse as the collector/connoisseur divide in the 19th century; the role of “creative restorers” in the history of antique fakery; and the intercontinental flow of fine and dec arts treasures from Europe to the collections of tycoons like Morgan, and from there into the public domain.

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SPECIAL EPISODE 1: The Customer Is Always Right . . . Eventually Mar 21, 2020

Show notes

We’re pushing out a series of new episodes that will examine the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of the antiques world. First up, Tim Martin of S. J. Shrubsole. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of stories told by plague-stricken raconteurs in fourteenth-century Italy, Martin decided to publish anecdotes from the curious lore of precious silver, keyed to objects that have passed through his shop, online. In this episode, Martin reads one of those stories, “The Customer is Always Right . . . Eventually.”

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Afterlife in Alabaster: A Canopic Jar from Charles Ede Feb 28, 2020

Show notes

Join us on a journey to ancient Egypt as we explore the quirky material history and dead-serious religious significance of a very curious object: a 2,500-year-old Imsety-headed canopic jar—i.e., a vessel made to hold a mummy’s liver. Charis Tyndall of UK antiquities dealer Charles Ede guest stars.

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Winter Show and Tell: Three young dealers and the antiques they ❤️ Jan 31, 2020

Show notes

Special guests James Boening (James Robinson, Inc.), Ria Murray (Lillian Nassau), and Taylor Thistlethwaite (Thistlethwaite Americana), join hosts Ben and Michael at the Park Avenue Armory during the Winter Show for a lively discussion about a Tiffany favrile glass pig, a silver molinet, a pair of Scottish Highlands pistols, a c. 1770 New York card table, and a fetching portrait miniature from the German school.

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Big Porcelain and Outsider Art at Christie's Jan 15, 2020

Show notes

Ever wondered how the otherwise-unremarkable locales of Meissen, Staffordshire, and Sèvres became Europe's porcelain-producing polestars? Or what outsider artists like Bill Traylor and William Edmondson, discovered by the art establishment in the 1930s and ‘40s, made of their newfound fame? The experts at Christie's have the answers!

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"Where the Past Never Gets Old": Re-presenting History at Colonial Williamsburg Dec 17, 2019

Show notes

Michael Diaz-Griffith treks to Colonial Williamsburg to talk with chief curator Ron Hurst about a new exhibition, "British Masterworks," in which objects like gilded chandeliers, a colossal Chippendale bookcase, and an armchair upholstered with a parrot and a basket of fruit—collected by curators in the early twentieth century to flesh out their conception of 1700s Williamsburg—tell very different stories today from the ones they were bought to support.

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Surrendering the Colors: An American Flag Collection Goes to Auction Nov 20, 2019

Show notes

The first American flag Peter Keim collected was a hand-sewn thirteen-star specimen that he found poking out of a paper bag at a farm sale. Happily for Keim, the flag turned out to be a hand-sewn beaut from 1862, worth $10,000. Keim now owns approximately four hundred American flags.

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Badger Up! Collecting Baseball-abilia with Internet Star Randall Oct 29, 2019

Show notes

Only a small number of people have the resources and wherewithal to collect Hepplewhite furniture or Paul Revere silver, but plenty collect baseball cards, including our guest this month: Randall, the voice behind the viral video The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger.

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