Estate Sales & Entropy

Harney & Son's Caramel 

(rating: 4.1/5) nutty and thick aroma that steeps easily within water and holds a taste that matches its sweet odor                                                          

                                                            Paru's Okinawa Brown Sugar

(rating: 4.4/5) similar in richness to the caramel tea but has something much more structural and straightforward with its taste and leaves a wonderful lasting of brightness after drinking

 

There is something intensely evocative about entering an estate sale. As someone who often feels absent from their own life, I have cultured a perversion for entering strangers' homes. Some feel social unease at the prospect of estate sales, of the disruptive greed that causes you to sift through the once private possessions of a dead person. Sometimes during the summer heat, the house's darker corners will emit a jarring stench of June folded with lingering death. I will admit that there is a terrifyingly inhumane contrast between the quiet grief of loss and the brisk destruction of life through sales. However, I'd still like to believe that air, even the fragrance of death, persists for the sake of beauty in reminder. Estate sales are a kiss with history and memory, a chance for the world to view the remnants of another's existence. Beauty exists in bargain because there is found joy in reattaching love to another's ligament of memory. 

I do not know how to love, but I know how to caress the weathering wood in your room of pianos. I know how to readjust the frames in your collection of Elizabeth Taylor memorabilia posters. I know how to lightly dust the cassette tape covers you listened to with your wife. I know how to close your china cabinet quietly so that your teaware won't crack. I know how to sit at the 1940s green tile cocktail bar you laughed at with your friends. I know how to hang your Himalayan wool sweater so that it won't stretch at the neck. I know how to replace the buckle on your red leather mule heels every five years. I know which dresser drawer you preferred to put your cameras in. 

When you choose to love something previously cherished, it’s already beyond repair. You love it broken. I love the way you hung your scarves in your kitchen and I love the way estate sales make loneliness holy and useful for me.

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I recently was gifted and finished reading a book: Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America by Joan Kee. Growing up in a dominantly white neighborhood, an unfamiliar joy still exists when I befriend another Korean, nevertheless be introduced to a Korean American art historian who exists and represents the exact intersection of art history and law I want to pursue. I have been reading and listening to many of her interviews and this one struck me as extremely profound.

(Thank you very much to Jacob Yi for introducing me to the work of Joan Kee <3)

HOST: What do you think are the possibilities of art history for social change, especially as art history right now as a discipline and as museums are trying to become institutions of social state change, while historically they've been institutions of privilege and exclusion?

JOAN: I think one priority is for art historians to know their own limitations. We can't know everything. We can't be something that we're not. There is a worrying tendency. And I've seen this with some students and scholars who think of art history almost as an ersetzt form of social work. And what happens is that you can't just insert yourself into community. This is a lesson that I've learned firsthand as a legal volunteer. When you have a certain degree of education, you think that "oh, I can help change this particular community." And then what happens is that you don't hear what that community is saying or what it is that they actually need or want. That's not your place. And so in some ways, I feel like when you defend your dissertation, you should also be required to take an oath-- like cow doctors have to take an oath--"Thou shalt not harm or do no harm." Because, yes, awareness is important, but I think the awareness that's necessary is what values do you want to espouse through your work? We know what we know, we know the how, sometimes we start thinking about the why. But what values do you stand for? And not because someone tells you that you should stand for you know, X, Y, or Z, or because you're afraid of censure. This is also another kind of challenge: how do we think about art? What sort of choices do we make because we stand for certain values rather than because we're afraid that somebody is going to call us out on Instagram or cancel us or say that we're aiding and abetting any number of ills? What do you stand for as someone who takes up public space? I think that is the baseline question that is answered. As for what it is that art history is to do? Well, maybe we should start with what they shouldn't be doing which is taking up the space of others whose voices need to be heard more frequently and more often. I think that's certainly one. Or thinking about "okay, so what is it that art historians have a comparative advantage in?" See now I'm betraying my secondary background in economics by using these phrases. I totally hate myself. Self-abjection, by the way, is something that might be the topic of a future book…knowing what it is that you can do in your own field, so as you're thinking about what sort of problems [an] artwork poses, why is it that an artist has spent so much time and effort producing or thinking about this work? I think that's something of genuine value. Sure, it's not curing cancer. It may not be a direct form of protest. But that also has value and I think it's okay to say that paying that kind of attention--which is, in fact, the most scarce resource, your time and attention--[is] in itself valuable.