THINGS, BEAUTIFUL THINGS

Skype Williams: One of my favorite shows of all time is Antiques Roadshow. I’ve been watching it since I was a kid. Have you ever watched it?

David Lê: It’s 100% the origin story for The Arcades. My Joker-ification begins with Antiques Roadshow. I won an essay contest when I was 12, and the local newspaper, the Staten Island Advance, profiled me. I was talking to the reporter about liking Antiques Roadshow and they described me as a 12-year-old who enjoyed “placing dollar prices on flea market finds.” I remember that was the phrase they used. My mom read it, and she was like, “I really don’t like that, it makes you sound like a loser.” And she was right.

You were born and raised on Staten Island. My grandmother is from Staten Island, and I remember going to yard sales there with her when I was young. Did you go to yard sales as a kid?

Not really. I didn’t have the expertise to do it. There is a famous thrift store on Staten Island called Everything Goes. It’s run by a weird cult called the Ganas. They were kind of hippies, but there was always weird sex stuff. It was very North Shore of Staten Island in this way where it was kind of benign, but also maybe not entirely benign. I liked that, but I never really went to flea markets. I got more formative auction experience through eBay. It was always online auctions, because we are Generation eBay.

What prompted you to start the Substack?

In 2018, I was famously living in my parents’ attic on Staten Island, which was grim. I had reached a point in my life where I had been bouncing around for so long and I wanted to feel settled. I was ready to be encumbered. I wanted stuff. I started poking around and got into online auctions, especially Live Auctioneers. I started buying stuff at auction to resell at my store, Maiden Name. I would look at hundreds and hundreds of objects at a time. When I started, I would only bid on a tiny fraction of it, and a tinier fraction of that would get resold. It felt like whenever I scrolled through the site, I was like, “This is fab and the world needs to see this.” It felt like a waste to put time into gathering all this stuff and then let it disappear into the ether.

Why the name The Arcades?

It’s named after Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project. My driving interest in these commodities, and that’s what they are, is the aura of the objects themselves. In the age of mechanical reproduction, there is an aura that still adheres to some of these objects, and that fascinates me. The world of commodities discloses something about the world that we live in, and these online auctions feel like they represent the best and the worst of it. On the one hand, there is the total flattening effect of gathering together thousands and thousands of the most precious things available at any moment and putting a price on them and having people bid against each other in a competitive, gamified way to sell them. At the same time it is this fabulous, scintillating surface that puts you in touch with beautiful, fascinating things. Benjamin understood that about the Arcades, which were the innovative retail surface of his time. That was the impetus behind it, but then I actually write it and it's just me getting into an explosive fight with a man in a van, or talking about My 600-lb Life, or lashing out at gay guys who I don’t like. It has those ambitions, but at the end of the day, it’s just me.

So the Substack comes out on Tuesday. Can you walk me through Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday? What goes into a typical week making the Substack?

Okay, so we have to back up a little bit and say that I unwind by compulsively scrolling through auctions. So it’s not like, “Oh, I have a deadline on Tuesday, I need to make sure to check out the auction.” It’s that I am always looking at the auctions. If I am in line for the bathroom at a party, I’m scrolling through auctions. Everything that goes into The Arcades is from Live Auctioneers, because it’s a helpful aggregator and I think it’s conceptually a little cleaner for it all to be on one platform. I’m always looking at a few hundred items at any given point. It goes up and down depending on how good stuff is out there. Usually, I write on Mondays, so I’ll go through what is coming to auction in that coming week, and then I separate it into what I think of as the D-list, or the David List, which is the stuff that I want to bid on, and then the stuff for the lurkers and the mooches, who are your standard non-paying subscriber to The Arcades. I pull the top 10 from that. I don’t think people need to see an Eames chair from me, so I always strive to make my edit more interesting than that. It’s also not optimized for a proper design collector who is going to drop 60k on a table. It’s supposed to be within the realm of possibility that you could bid on it. Sometimes I put super expensive stuff on there just for everyone to look at.

You had a store in Dimes Square called Maiden Name on Orchard Street. Can you describe what the store was?

When my co-founder and I started the project in 2019, it was online only. There was the fashion line Maiden Name, which started out as seven women’s blouses because my co-founder used to do design at Polo Ralph Lauren. My job was to build what we called a “visual conversation” between fashion, art, and design. We eventually hosted a pop-up that went really well. Then the line really expanded into full women’s and men’s offerings. In the store, I would show contemporary design, almost like a showroom, and also old pieces. I loved the new stuff, but the older design objects were always really interesting and fun for me. 

Did you buy vintage furniture and decor from auction sites to dress up the physical store?

The idea was that you walked through the door, everything was for sale. The whole environment was shoppable, but from the get-go, there were problems. I would buy stuff and be like, “I don’t want to sell that at all.” There were always these not-for-sale pieces, which was probably not a smart business idea, but it’s hard not to want to collect and hoard.

There’s a gay history of antiques and auctions and interior design. Does that cross your mind?

One of the ancient, stereotypical gay professions is an antiques dealer. Interiors has this gay thing about it. I’m a proud inheritor of that tradition. Maybe it’s just me humoring myself or internalized homophobia, but I actually don’t really think of myself as an interior decorator, or even an unemployed interior decorator, because my driving interest is collecting. Maybe this is a mischaracterization, but generally speaking, the art in interior-decorated spaces is terrible.

The auction world is kind of scary. When people think of auctions, it seems like every item will cost one million dollars, so it’s cool to see listings where you could imagine yourself actually buying something.

Some of these auctions were originally for the trade only, not the general public, so there’s a lot of friction in the process. These auction websites are built more for wholesalers, not retailers. You need to deal with all of the shipping and logistics, and nobody’s there to help you. How the whole thing works is a little bit confusing. Some of that is just legacy.

Does it feel like The Arcades is a living organism? When people make an album or have a clothing line, they think of their creative endeavor as their baby. Do you think of The Arcades like that?

I saw a TikTok of Toni Morrison talking about the space of writing as a place that is just for her. The truth is The Arcades is just for me. I think it works best when I totally tune out the consequences that will come of it. There are good constraints that I accept, like keeping the prices reasonable. It has a nice readership, and there are people who could be professionally helpful for me to connect with, but I think if it got to the point where I was writing for them, it would lose the joy of what makes it fun to write and fun to read. There’s a world where I could only care about aesthetics and optimize for that, but I try to keep it in the realm of the possible, which I realize is a class-specific consideration. The litmus test is, do I like it? It’s kind of as simple as that.

How many things are you buying per month on average?

This feels like something I would talk about with my analyst. Here’s the problem, and I’ll just be totally transparent about it: I tell myself that I’m buying stuff to resell it, in which case I give myself permission to go wild. But sometimes I get stuck with inventory that I can’t really resell and then I get attached to it. I would say only ever six, seven pieces a month. I find that once you break the seal, it’s really hard to stop. In the last month, though, I’ve purchased like, one thing. I bought this desk that I should not have purchased, but whatever.

Are there any items that you are drawn to over and over again? I see glass tables a lot.

As a design philosophy, I like things that are either hyper-modern or crude. I want stuff that has a real materiality to it, or stuff that’s dematerialized. I’m always going for dynamic tension in a room, so the individual pieces are usually on either side of that. It's the drama of bringing them together that’s exciting to me.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve found on Live Auctioneers?

I feel like it’s going to be on one of our top five lists, but that ivory carved vagina with the fly on it, the Japanese one. An iconic piece. There’s a lot of weird shit that lives in the memorabilia world that I end up not even seeing.