Brian Slattery Photo
At auction was a celluloid butterfly. The opening bid was $50.
“Do I hear $60?” Fred Giampietro asked.
Giampietro (pictured above) was talking to the 20 people in the room in front of him at New Haven Auctions in Erector Square, who had come to bid.
He was also talking to the roughly 2,000 more bidders in 18 countries who were following the auction through the internet, plus more people who were able to call in and participate in the auction by phone.
A bid came over the internet for $60. Then $70. Within 10 seconds the price rose to $100. Then stopped. Giampietro asked for $110. No takers.
“Fair warning,” he said. “Going once, going twice. Selling to the internet for $100. Sold.”
Bidders browsing the objects before the auction.
Sunday afternoon marked one of three or four live auctions that Fred Giampietro of New Haven Auctions plans to hold this year in Erector Square. (He also runs Fred Giampietro Gallery on Chapel Street.) Sunday’s auction featured items collected from various estate sales, ranging from coin collections to folk art to paintings and silverware to a bakelite radio and oriental rugs. Some items would go for hundreds of dollars; others for tens of thousands.
Some of the lots up for auction.
Giampietro had started the bidding on the 354 lots in the auction a few weeks ago by posting them through the auction’s website, and so all of the items up for auction had opening bids attached to them, willing buyers ready to purchase them for a certain price.
In a way, “everything’s been sold,” Giampietro said, before the auction started. “It’s just a question of how much.”
Giampietro has been holding auctions for about 40 years, ever since he opened shop on Whitney Avenue in Hamden as an antiques dealer in 1978. They were a natural outgrowth of his business. “You go out in the field” to find items to sell, he said. “People call you, and you sell stuff to buy something else.”
It used to be a smaller, slower, more local operation. “The internet changed all that,” Giampietro said.
But while the form of auctions has changed and live auctions can now throw their doors open to the world, other aspects of them remain constant. Giampietro’s knowledge about the antiques market — put bluntly, knowing what older objects still have value and which ones don’t — drawn from his years of experience is as important as ever.
“You have to talk to people and help them understand why it has the value it has,” he said, from an object’s craftsmanship to its pedigree to its history to perhaps its uniqueness. The more he knows, the more he can bring objects to auction that people will want to buy — and the more participants he can get.
“You know, people can be anywhere now,” he said.
Many lots still were sold with little fanfare: a set of sterling flatware for $1,150, a pitcher for $160, a set of platters for $325. Two silhouette portraits sold for $30.
Then came Lot 51, an alabaster fruit collection resting in a painted trencher. The bidding started low, but it turned out two people in the room wanted it. The price flew quickly up to $400, when one of the bidders finally relented. The bid revealed an advantage to attending the auction in person. If two people in the room were bidding against one another, between them they could bid up the price at lightning speed, faster than anyone could bid on the phone or the internet.
The phone and the internet could allow for their own kind of drama. As Lot 55 — an antique quilt — came up for auction, a feud began between a bidder on the internet — channeled through an auction representative on a laptop — and a bidder who called in on the phone. The price, which began in the hundreds of dollars, climbed north of $1,000 in hundred-dollar increments. It reached $2,000 as the audience sat impassively and kept rising. As the price hit $3,000 and kept going, a few people in the audience craned their necks to glance around the room, perhaps looking for the item that was causing the excitement. It finally stopped at $3,700; the internet bidder had won.
Remote bidders weren’t at a complete disadvantage, either. In the case of Lot 62, a swan decoy (in the photograph above) began just about $2,000 and climbed northward, spurred in $100 increments by a bidder in the room and another bidder on the phone. The price jumped to $3,000 and kept going. It got close to $4,000, and the bidder in the room seemed to be starting to flag. Giampietro appeared to know the bidder in the room. “Come on, it’s only $100,” he joked. The bidder was still in the race. The price reached $4,000. When it did, however, the representative on the phone yelled out a number.
“$4,250,” she said. It was a sudden jump out of those $100 increments. Giampietro turned to the bidder in the room, who shook her head. The phone bidder had won.
A horse weathervane then brought out the first five-digit contest of the day. As two of the bidders in the room competed for it, an object that Giampietro had estimated would sell for somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 quickly hit $15,000 and kept moving, in $1,000 increments, north of $20,000. It sold in the room, quickly, for $24,000. The victorious bidder was pleased. He exclaimed out loud that he hadn’t seen a weathervane of that quality for quite a while.
But maybe there was something about acquiring it through an auction as well. “Everybody needs a sport,” Giampietro had explained at the beginning of the auction. As the deal was done on the weathervane, the auction moved to the next lot. The race was on.
To find out more about New Haven Auctions and get news on its next auction, visit its website here.
