Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on July 28, 2009

That's right: this here is a genuine IKEA tin desk machine-crafted around Y2K, about 20 years before WWIII. It is only one of 900 copies surviving from the original batch of 85,000...

Is this the future of antiques? I confess to actually running these kinds of narratives through my mind as I try to grasp what tomorrow's furniture world will be like. How long can our current pool of antiques last? Eventually, I suppose they will all break, rust, shatter or otherwise vanish into the thin air of history until the last remaining specimens become an endangered species of craftsmanship. So if we aren't producing new quality furniture, we are doomed to run out.

Of course, there are quality furniture companies out there but many produce goods on such a small scale, and often in a price range that excludes most income levels, that I doubt their production can replace the dwindling supply of yesterday's furniture.¹ Perhaps I am wrong and some Chinese manufacturer will get it right and corner the reproduction market by producing masterpieces for just a few dollars an hour.

Somehow I doubt that, too. But then, the 19th century was a time when the Industrial Revolution came into full swing, so there must have been plenty of junk that wound up in Victorian scrap heaps. Even so, I imagine the supply/demand ratio has changed a bit since then. I think it's safe to conclude that tomorrow's antique connoisseurs will look on our time with a keen pang of envy, as if ours is the age of plenty. (Isn't it?) Like Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: a hundred years in the future, and he's finally got the dough to own a real flesh-and-blood sheep like it's some kind of occult luxury. The poor thing winds up being pushed off the top of his apartment complex by a vengeful android.

Classic science fiction aside, don't hold your breath for antiques. Like retro adverts, muscle cars and bad hair, all rages come and go, so perhaps tomorrow's in-the-know antique gurus will wind up raving on about vintage 2000 junk after all. I think I have a solution, though. We wait for AI to come around and get them to produce aforementioned masterpieces for no wages at all. Then, when we find ourselves in Deckard' shoes, we just won't keep our last-of-the-sheep survivor on the rooftop.

1 Except, of course, our fabulous supply of handmade reproduction furniture. :)

Tags: furniture, philip k. dick, IKEA

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