Pinning Antiques: Is a Virtual Collection Satisfying?
Our online research about antiques often leads to images of antiques (including many that people have downloaded from our own website) posted on photo-sharing social platforms such as Pinterest.
Users of Pinterest post and manage photos within categories called pinboards. The pinboards reflect the personal interests of the page creator, and often are organized along themes such as hobbies, travel, cooking, fashion and decorating. Users can browse the images on other people’s pinboards for inspiration and ideas, and then re-pin images to their own page, thus creating a network of users with similar interests.
As with browsing any networking site, one image leads to another on Pinterest. A case in point is discovering images of vintage lodging signs that sold at Garth’s auction in Ohio when we were researching the price structure of antique trade signs. This Round Top Inn sign that sold for $3,819 appeared on someone’s Pinterest pinboard (pinterest.com/debrajaynep/).
Other images of vintage signs from the same auction appeared on another pinboard (pinterest.com/cheryl_mcmullen/), such as this tourist lodging that sign that sold for $2,115,
and this Riverside Hotel sign sold that for $4,700.
Both pinboards on which these signs appeared display collections of images representing the pinners’ interests and favorite aesthetics.
Pinterest thus allows people to build a personal identity through images gleaned from non-personal sources, such as an auction website. Whereas Facebook and Instagram pages are usually filled with photos of people and places present in one’s everyday life, owners of Pinterest boards create a dream world of sorts, constructed of images comprising a world they might like to inhabit.
Unlike creating an avatar on a fantasy gaming site, an identity created on a Pinterest board is grounded in the real world. It is conceivable that a person could own every one of the outfits pinned to their site from a fashion catalog, or recreate in their own homes the rooms pinned from decorator blogs.
Whereas in the physical world we get to know someone’s tastes from the clothes they wear or the art they hang in their home, Pinterest ramps up the process of conveying personal style and identity as users show themselves to be connoisseurs of material objects that are perhaps beyond their practical or financial reach.
We were reminded of the intersection between online identity-building and real-world antiques in a recent conversation with an antiques dealer about his experience exhibiting at a show in New York City. He had an eye-catching display of colorful objects filling an entire wall. Throughout the course of the show he estimated that several hundred people stood in front of his wall to snap a photo of it, but none of them engaged with him as a potential buyer would.
It is likely that many of those photos were posted to social media sites by the picture snappers. Perhaps they were seeking to bolster their identities as taste-makers, or maybe they were simply conveying their personal aesthetic to their followers.
As antiques dealers we’d like to think that images of antiques posted on Pinterest, Instagram and the like would eventually lead viewers to seek out and buy an antique similar to what is pictured, thereby becoming curators of an actual rather than a virtual collection. For us, the physical, tangible presence of an object with an old soul is life-enhancing. But perhaps for others, a picture of something beautiful pinned to a virtual board is satisfying enough.
Even if those pinners never become antiques collectors, we can be glad that antiques are being celebrated within contemporary cultural conversations (albeit more pictorial than verbal) that enrich, inspire and feed our dream worlds.
