DIGEST 72: Low Grade Background Chaos
At Auction June 18-24, 2025
As we now know, the “live show” of this substack is happening on June 26 at 7 PM (email david@the-arcades.com if you want to come). The temptation to block the exits, wheel out a large TV monitor (thick—no flat screen) and screen Dune 2 while I snap at people on my mic for talking and offer commentary (I don’t know a single character’s name) is nearly overwhelming. I do want to answer some FAQ’s:
(1) It’s not an auction. Everything is for sale, but hard priced. I love my baby vultures (new name for Arcades readers), but you can find your carrion elsewhere!
(2) It is only kid friendly in the sense of Eve Sedgwick’s seminal 1991 essay How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay. That’s really all I have to say about that!
(3) The actual live show has a 15 minute run time. This is not The Brutalist (thank God—still have not made it past minute 6—self-serious twaddle, the idea of a movie, but not a movie—does this change in minute 7???).
I can’t say much more. The show mediates its author’s psychosexual interior through the externalia of chairs and downtown notables. That’s the logline.
In other news, I am concerned that all is not well at LiveAuctioneers. The company aggregates auctions and offers a clean, uniform surface to search a revolving inventory of (I’m guessing) hundreds of thousands of lots, with a daily churn in the thousands (all the Arcades links are LA). That was game-changing. Part of the initial conceit was also that it provided excellent customer service, which is a genuine pain point in this notably old-school sector, consisting of many small, not particularly tech-friendly mom-and-pop firms. I do genuinely think LA offers great value to bidders (I know some of the auction houses bristle at the fees—feel free to weigh in in the comments.)
This is to say that as I found myself sending increasingly deranged emails to LA customer service last week (see below) I suspected something was amiss. It was only by commenting on their instagram posts that I got some poor social media manager to ask someone from customer service to call me (she sounded scared on the phone). I had been automatically charged for shipping for an item I planned on picking up (in point of fact, I changed my mind and did want it shipped, but I was too embarrassed to back pedal). When I was in Elmhurst making the pickup, I met Freddie of Brothers Auctions (great guy—I think he runs auctions out of his apartment—told me to make sure and bid on his rubies later that night which I was oddly tempted by?) and he explained that LA closed its offices and is now all remote and understaffed, which is why the customer service is so bad. Anyway the shipping would have cost $40 and that’s exactly how much I spent on Tibetan momo. This is the way.
I love these tables. Never cheap but always fabulous. I would like it in a bathroom.
Nice color and shape. Weirdly expensive already.
“And when was the first time you remember buying a heavy glass table?”
Mayan Revival—who is talking about this? I went down a whole rabbit hole because I swear there was a 90s movie with a Mayan Revival office (does anyone else remember this?) but I just spent an hour looking at photos of Elliot Gould’s southwestern office in Look Who’s Talking? and I need to move on.
Why not? Incidentally “low grade background chaos” is how Arcades Poet Laureate Azealia Banks has characterized 2025 and that feels right to me.
Not actually Gallé but the acid green and black are very cool to me.
Well, yes!
Clever and fun.
Carlo Nason (B. 1936, Italy) great designer from one of the oldest glass-blowing families in Murano. I love this one.
Contemporary designer. Born in Huddersfield, UK in 1980. That chair is sickening.
May the hammer fall ever in your favor!