BOSTON, MASS. - Word of a new Internet antiques firm named
AntiquesAmerica.com first leaked to the trade at the Ellis
Memorial Antique Show in October 1999. The firm, incorporated in
July 1999, had just rented space on Congress Street close to
Boston's South Station. Founders attempted to recruit staff
members and advisors. Since last January, Antiques and The
Arts Weekly has conducted a series of interviews with the
founder, executives, and employees of the firm. Perceptions of
the company's goals, operational plan, and practices have been in
a state of flux as the staff worked through layers of the
creative process. This story has been held until more
comprehensive answers were obtained.
Among the thousands of Internet antiques Web sites,
AntiquesAmerica.com is distinguished by its potential capital
assets and the professional business management skills of its
executives. However, those same executives are inexperienced in
the antiques market, and some of their commercial programs may be
inefficient. The firm aspires to become a virtual university, and
the foundation for that component is a museum affiliation section
that has created innovative programs.
There are plans for a major retailing site, but untested aspects
of the commercial plan render it unpredictable. A more
predictable outcome is that some competing retail sites offering
antiques will increase the amount of information they provide to
the public.
History
Last January, Julien Tavener, founder of AntiquesAmerica.com,
stated that he began the firm after three years of careful
planning. While he stated that he had a concept of the site's
overall direction, he also acknowledged that the firm had not
defined its revenue sources. He was confident that revenue
sources would emerge when the site was launched.
In speaking of his vision, Tavener often used the term
"university of the Internet," and he indicated that his site
would not be "another retail site." His cosmopolitan vision was
conveyed by statements such as "We will cover the entire span of
the market from postcards to highboys." He envisioned a staff
working in close harmony toward a common goal.
Tavener is a respected member of the print world. For a decade,
he has owned Haley and Steele, a nationally active print firm
based in Boston. Other antiquarian print specialists hold him in
esteem, and decorators trust his eye. Although he had limited
contact with other segments of the antiques community, he trusted
that "others [would] share my vision." He probably underestimated
the huge task and cost of launching a substantial firm that would
span the antiques community, and also have a significant
technological arm.
Tavener benefited from four elements that eluded most antiques
Web site founders. Firstly, he was based in Boston, a city with a
deep pool of antiques experts and with world-class decorative and
fine arts reference libraries.
Secondly, Boston has a tremendous infrastructure of high-speed
computer tubes and lines. Elsewhere in the nation, real estate
adjacent to high-speed computer tubes rents at a super premium,
but in Boston similar real estate in the vicinity of the Big Dig
was available at a discount.
Thirdly, renowned curator Jonathan Fairbanks was seeking a
position in the Boston area after his dismissal from the Museum
of Fine Arts.
Fourthly, the Allston-Brighton neighborhood of Boston was a
leading center for creating television commercials and producing
PBS documentaries on short contracts. That community had a
surplus of excellent media talent seeking opportunities to
develop multimedia shorts for the Internet.
A quest for financial backing led Tavener to a recently founded
Cambridge, Mass. firm named NetVentures. In early April,
NetVentures made a substantial investment in AntiquesAmerica.com,
and became the major owner of the firm. Tavener returned to Haley
and Steele, and on April 7 Dekkers Davidson was appointed the
firm's first CEO. Since then, Davidson has installed a new
administrative team.
In early 1999, Adam Kirsch founded NetVentures as a venture
capital firm specializing in Internet companies. A staff of ten
people works at the home office of NetVentures. Kirsch was a
managing director of Bain Capital, an early investor in Staples.
Since investing in AntiquesAmerica.com, NetVentures has also
funded mycounsel.com, openstudio.com, and kaivo.com. The firm has
total assets of approximately $50,000,000 with most of that money
held in reserve. There are a number of other private investors in
AntiquesAmerica.com, and the total amount of money invested in
the company is over $5 million.
Davidson has a strong background in business management. After
receiving his BA from St. Lawrence University, he earned an MBA
from Harvard University, and most recently he had served as
president of Canada's Rogers Wireless Ontario Region. He was
previously vice president, New England, for Sprint Personal
Communications Services, and vice president at Mercer Management
Consulting.
Online Access
AntiquesAmerica.com is less accessible to Internet users than
most antiques and arts Web sites. It can be quickly reached via
Media One broadband service for subscribers in Boston. That
service is being extended to some Boston suburbs. However, an
antiques dealer with a laptop computer interfacing with a 56K
modem serviced by a telephone line will find a slower service.
With his system, the site opens and operates at a reasonable
speed, but if a person has seen the site over a cable connection,
then he will notice that loading is slower with a telephone
connection.
When skeptical Internet users acquire new computers for
specialized uses such as graphics and database management, they
often protect those computers by keeping them offline. A
consequence of erecting firewalls in this manner is that these
users continue using older, less powerful machines online. At
sites designed to rapidly download particularly huge quantities
of material, the older systems may not synchronize with the site
due to slow modems, slow processors, limited available memory,
and, most often, an unsuitable browser.
CEO Davidson realizes that some potential users cannot open his
site, and points to heavy video sites like Disney that are yet
less accessible. However, those aspire to be entertainment sites,
not antiques universities. The only antiques site that seems to
have as severe an access problem is the Rijksmuseum. We raised
the issue with the deputy director of the Rijksmuseum when he was
in Boston, and we raise it here.
Davidson replied that the technical staff is constantly working
to improve user access. He anticipates access will become less of
an issue as technical refinements are made at the site and as
users replace older computers with newer models.
When the site is accessed, files are downloaded to the user's
computer. Users can copy files that are word-processing documents
or picture images. However, databases are protected, and only a
single entry can be downloaded at a time. For example, users can
copy an entire article by former Christie's senior vice president
of educational services Elisabeth (Betsey) Garret, but they
cannot download the entire database of museums in Maine.
Museum Affiliations
AntiquesAmerica.com aspires to be a university of the Internet,
and a major information component is the museum section. The firm
creatively applies media advances to the development of museum
presentations. Museum staffs across the nation speak with
familiarity about the site. It is apparent that other museums are
looking to this site for ideas and models for enriching Web sites
for their museums.
Jonathan Fairbanks.
Jonathan Fairbanks is responsible for museum relations. His most
ambitious project is a three-year affiliation with the Society
for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. He closely
coordinates planning on this project with Jane Nylander, director
of SPNEA. The Web site has a section devoted to SPNEA house
museums, collections, and publications. Both Fairbanks and
Davidson indicate that the firm is conferring with other museums
to develop similar affiliations.
The most innovative element is the use of slide shows with
voice-overs that present tours of house museums and display
highlights of collections. The experience of viewing the slide
shows approaches that of watching videotapes. A student living in
Oregon can experience a walk-through tour of an Eighteenth
Century New England home. Former owner of Sloan's Green Guide
To Antiquing, Lisa Freeman, commented, "The natural next step
will be streaming video. At this time, most computers do not have
sufficient bandwidth to receive that much information, but that
will change. New technology will multiply our programming
options."
Museums are likely to explore creating similar slide shows by
outside vendors rather than attempting it in-house. Slide shows
require a small team with advanced technological skills.
State-of-the-art service is available in Hollywood, New York and
Boston, but fine multimedia vendors can be found in most states.
AntiquesAmerica.com is making out-of-print museum periodicals
available by using the page-format copying technology. Antiques
America has converted most back issues of SPNEA's periodical
Old Time New England to a digital format.
Some readers perform similar conversions at home with a scanner
connected to a graphics computer that stores data on CDs. Museums
have generally not utilized this technology, but it merits
consideration.
Reader use of early publications will hinge on the library
services provided, particularly indexing and critical annotation.
Writings on American fine and decorative arts prior to 1965
sometimes lacked scholarly skepticism, and amateur writers often
struggled laboriously. Even renowned writers of the earlier
period were sometimes overly presumptive or easily deceived. The
famed Wallace Nutting was tricked with many faked and married
clocks and pieces of furniture. His less careful contemporaries
were more frequently fooled. Alfred Barr was no Theodore
Stebbins. There are some interesting nuggets in early
periodicals, but appropriate librarian services are needed to
conveniently locate the veins.
AntiquesAmerica.com provides worldwide access to Old Time New
England by dedicating both data storage capacity and access
lines to this function. Industry observers will attempt to gauge
whether user response justifies the substantial cost of Internet
service. Alternatively museums could provide public access to
out-of-date publications by CD or DVD storage. The entire run
would fit on a single DVD that could be sold for a few dollars.
Fairbanks and his staff are compiling the most comprehensive list
of museums in America. Discretion is being exercised, and some
museums have been left off the list. Fairbanks explained, "While
we have sought to make the list comprehensive, we have also
weeded out a few museums that in our judgement offered little to
the public. When we finish with the list of museums in the United
States, we will go onto to Canada, Mexico, and the world."
Individual antiques enthusiasts with Internet access have already
assembled their customized lists of museums.
AntiquesAmerica.com's list will be useful for locating museums in
unfamiliar areas when antiques enthusiasts prepare to travel. It
sometimes appears that search engines pirate each other's
databases, and if they do, then slightly altered versions of the
Fairbanks museum list might appear elsewhere.
As long as Fairbanks actively works at AntiquesAmerica.com,
museum affiliations will remain a beachhead for the company. He
and Betsey Garrett have assembled an Editorial Board that
includes curators or directors from most major museums in
America.
When competing antiques Web sites search for arrangements with
museums, they are likely to be less global since they do not
aspire to become virtual universities. Probably they will target
museums in their local area or museums that share their subject
field. With multiple suitors, museum boards are likely to seek
multiple affiliations rather than singular arrangements, and the
critical review of proposals will intensify.
Most major museums are currently developing hugely expanded Web
sites created by in-house staffs. The Art Institute of Chicago,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston are a few of many museums that will soon have expanded Web
sites displaying substantial portions of their collections.
Smaller museums with tightly focused collections will be more
likely to benefit by partnering with AntiquesAmerica.com and
similar firms.
Educational Programs
AntiquesAmerica.com has not yet conducted an education program,
but its market is anticipating high quality symposia. Betsey
Garrett directs the educational division, and it is expected that
she will offer distinguished programs similar to those she
organized for Sotheby's and more recently for Christie's. The
first education weekend will be in Boston, and it will coincide
with the Ellis Memorial Antiques Show. That will be an onsite,
rather than online, program.
Spotlight
A strong content feature with some market material is the
Spotlight section managed by Lisa Freeman. Each month one topic
is selected, and seven to twelve articles on the topic are posted
on the site. After a topic's featured month, the Spotlight series
is archived so that the material is permanently accessible
online. Some topics to date have been silver, gardens, hunting
and fishing, decoys, and scrimshaw. The academic pedantic writing
style creeps into some reports, but there has been good content
for determined readers.
Dealer Directory
Lisa Freeman and her staff have created an antiques dealer
directory with 18,000 listings. However, when we jointly searched
the system, we had limited success. For instance, we could not
find furniture specialist Clark Pearce. It was determined that as
a consultant, he did not meet the company's criteria for the
dealer list. While that technicality is correct, Pearce and
similar consultants are a major element of the antiques market.
Our next search was for antiques dealer Marla Segal, but we could
not find her in a name search because her middle name was
misspelled in the database. It is a bit much to expect the user
to know the middle names of casual business contacts.
The more successful search mode was by business name, but that
also had limitations. For example, although Old Town Antiques
(Marblehead, Mass.) was in the database, we were unable to find
it by a name search. The site hopes to expand their search
capabilities in later versions of the site.
This is the first in a two part series on Antiques America.
Next week Antiques and The Arts Weekly will publish the
concluding article that addresses the firm's commercial
section.
