How much is this stuff actually worth? The family wanted to know.
They were curious, not crass.
Because Kurt Shaw’s grandmother had a lot of stuff. And a lot of it, they had to admit, was kind of cool.
When she died a few years back, her place in Pittsburgh by then, just like everybody’s grandmother’s place by then, was a storehouse for the archeology of her everyday life. She was both consumer, and collector.
Her furniture? Easy. Antique, simply by age and use. Her walls? She turned them into a gallery, and not all of the framed items Shaw’s grandmother liked to regard were reproductions.
Tchotchkes, bric-and-brac, this-and-that … so the family brings in an expert. At least that’s what they thought. “He bought everything for $500,” Shaw said, Sunday in Morgantown.
Don’t know much about art?
Which would have been OK, except for one thing. All that stuff was worth way more that. The family did some research, then reconstructed a post-inventory of all the things they remembered: Designer (vintage) clothing, Tiffany lamps, original artwork, first-edition hardcover books, and the like.
“It was worth thousands more than $500,” he said. “That’s what got me into all this.”
“All this,” as in the art business — as a practitioner, a critic and an appraiser. After earning a fine arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University 30 years ago, Shaw became a successful cartoonist and illustrator whose work appeared in Esquire, Cosmopolitan and other national magazines.
He went from that to sculpture, where he scored a plum gig doing industrial, abstract wall designs for passenger ships in the Royal Caribbean cruise line. He owned and operated successful studios in San Francisco and Pittsburgh and became an art critic for a newspaper along the way. Shaw in recent years came back home, and as he’s done so, he’s also scaled back on the practitioner end to focus on appraisals for the people who also have grandmothers who had stuff.
Call it a super-friendly “Antiques Road Show,” if you want to.
Shaw makes house calls, and he’s a certified personal property appraiser, on top of his expertise and education in the fine arts. Visit www.appraisers forinsurance.com for more information.
“I usually travel a 100-mile radius from Pittsburgh,” he said.
It’s all to help answer that aforementioned question: “How much is it worth?”
“It’s amazing what people have packed away,” he said.
For example, he informed a suddenly happy person last week that all those model trains in all their original packaging in his possession could easily fetch upwards of $40,000, at auction. That’s what he was doing in Morgantown on Sunday.
Beyond the flea market
Shaw was working his craft at the open house of a dwelling on South High Street, that was being shown by Realtor Zella Horseman. Horseman thought it would be a fun way to get people in the house while bringing possible treasures from where they live now.
Treasures, they were.
A terracotta medallion honoring Ben Franklin that may date back to the late 1700s. An 1850s Qing Dynasty porcelain figurine purchased during an excursion to China. Shaw gives his appraisal, then directs people to buyers and auction houses for a next step, should they prefer.
“I’m not in the business of buying,” he said. “I just don’t want to see anybody ripped off like we were with my grandmother.”
Diane Day appreciated Shaw’s accounting with her offering. She’s an art enthusiast who brought in a painting by Bruce Crane, the artist whose light-diffused landscapes and seascapes were as stark as they were inviting.
“I knew exactly what I was looking at when I bought it,” she said.
