Decorative Use Only
29 January 2021
From golden baths to million-dollar cups - can useful objects be too valuable to be used?
Billy Jobling
Billy Jobling is Senior Writer and Researcher in the Post-War and Contemporary Art department at Christie's, London.
If you had a bathtub worth four million dollars, would you use it? That depends, you might answer. Did I pay for it? Might it get damaged? Just how nice can a bath be, anyway?
Francois-Xavier Lalanne (1927-2008), Unique 'Hippopotame I' Bathtub, welded brass and copper, 50 x 114 x 33 in. Sold for USD 4,335,000 in September 2019 at Christie’s.
Credit: Christie’s Images Ltd. 2021.
The late duo Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, who made the 1969 hippopotamus-shaped tub that recently sold for that sum at Christie’s, would have wanted it to be used. They delighted in fusing functionality and fantasy, blurring the lines between furniture and fine art. The gleaming hippo looks like a sculpture, but is ingeniously engineered inside: it opens up to reveal a working bath in its belly, and a vanity, complete with sink, in its gaping mouth.
Money has a way of making things seem untouchable. To come close to an expensive artwork is often to experience a sort of vertigo – the giddy awareness that one clumsy elbow could crash through a canvas, or knock a sculpture to the floor.
Most artworks, while subject to a certain amount of wear and tear, aren’t meant to be touched. Other objects, though, can be practical, ornamental and immensely valuable all at once. Chairs can be sat on, rugs walked over, books read, bathtubs bathed in. At what point does something useful become too precious to be used?
René Lalique, "Saint François", circa 1930, opalescent glass, France, 17.5 cm.
Credit: Hickmet Fine Arts.
Blissfully unaware of a possession’s worth, you might use (or abuse) it for years. Some of Antiques Roadshow’s more memorable discoveries have involved jaw-dropping tales of survival. A 19th-century French jardinière was valued at £10,000 in one 1991 episode – much to the surprise of the owner, who had let his children use it as a goalpost. He kept it, presumably at a safe distance from any more flying footballs, and sold it at auction for £668,000 twenty years later.
In 2008, a woman showed expert Eric Knowles a small glass vase which she had paid one pound for at a car-boot sale. She thought the vase was ‘junk’, but had bought it for the plant it contained. After the plant died, she had almost thrown it away. Knowles identified the vase as a unique lost-wax creation by René Lalique, and it later sold for more than thirty thousand times its purchase price. A more decadent thrill can be found in knowing full well that something is of enormous value, and using it anyway. The Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian caused a stir in 2014 by drinking, on camera, from a Ming Dynasty cup which he had recently purchased for over thirty-six million dollars.
Chicken Cup, Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Chenghua mark and period (1465–87), in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection.
Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
‘Emperor Qianlong has used it, now I’ve used it’, Liu said afterwards. ‘Such a simple thing, what is so crazy about that?’ Many would argue that owning something so exquisite comes with a certain duty of care. But does the splendour or historical importance of an object preclude the right to use it? In a sense, having paid for the cup, Liu is free to do with it what he wishes. Liu’s cup was costly not just because of its age and quality, but because of its rare imperial provenance. In the field of antique furniture, a history of more humble use is often just as sought after: a long-term narrative of polishing, dusting and day-to-day wear, recorded in the form of patina. There is little more tragic to a connoisseur than the overzealous cleaning of a centuries-old piece, whose bloom of natural aging is a great part of its appeal.
This idea has something in common with the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi – often translated as ‘flawed beauty’ – which embraces the transience and imperfection of all things. Some forms of tea-ware are valued most highly for their accrual of nicks, visible repairs and subtle shifts in colour over time, all of which add to the nobility of a well-made item serving its purpose.
While most of us don’t have to worry about the wisdom of soaking in a Lalanne bathtub or sipping from ancient porcelain, we have all encountered something timeworn, usable and beautiful that is sealed away from further wear. Such a thing might preserve old tales on its surface, but is denied the inscription of daily experience, utility and joy that it could bring to a contemporary owner. Perhaps the greater act of respect, in many cases, is to continue using a useful object as its maker intended, and so to become part of its story.
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