Significant Objects

But ... we'll be back.

A few moments ago, the auction for our 100th item (the Missouri Shotglass, story courtesy of Jonathan Lethem) ended. Moment of silence, please. The research phase of the Significant Objects experiment is over; next, we’ll analyze the data. And while we’re doing that, we’ll relaunch the project as a charitable fundraising effort — stay tuned for more details. In the meantime, here’s an overview of the experiment.

Between July 6 (1st story posted) and November 20 (100th auction ended) of 2009, Significant Objects auctioned off $128.74 worth of insignificant doodads and dinguses, netting $3,612.51 for our contributing authors. Perhaps this makes us (Rob Walker and Josh Glenn) sound like the greatest salesmen alive, but we prefer to think of ourselves as quasi-anthropological researchers.

We’d both investigated the What makes things meaningful? conundrum before: Rob’s “Consumed” column for the New York Times Magazine, and his 2008 book, Buying In, analyze the ways branders and designers entice us into valuing certain products; and Josh’s 2007 book Taking Things Seriously (Princeton Architectural Press) documented the manner in which we invest ordinary objects with extraordinary significance by way of autobiographical stories.

After meeting last year, we decided to join forces and run a controlled experiment that would enable us to analyze in as precise a fashion as possible the influence of narrative on what political economists vaguely call the “exchange value” of commodities — not their selling price (i.e., what we paid for insignificant objects) but a less tangible form of expression of value in trade (i.e., what eBay users might pay for significant objects). Narrative transforms the insignificant into the significant — that was our hypothesis. But precisely how does it happen? We wanted to peek inside narrative’s black box.
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Today’s installment of Dorothy Gambrell’s popular webcomic Cat and Girl riffs on significant objects:

It’s really weird to look at our store and see just one item!

But there it is: Missouri Shot Glass + Story by Jonathan Lethem. And the auction closes in less than 24 hours … who will end up with the last of the original Significant Objects?

After that auction closes we’ll start crunching the numbers and share some findings with you next week, from our unique experiment. (With the close of today’s auction we passed $3,500 in sales. Not a bad Significance Markup on roughly $125 worth of yard-sale and thrift-store thingamajigs.)

And as noted we’ve already started organizing a sequel — this time we’ll be giving all the proceeds to charity. (Thanks by the way to those who offered thoughts about which charity via Twitter yesterday.) Stand by for details ….

Shown above: ready-to-mail boxes containing the last three objects from the Significant Objects experiment, along with a few odds and ends that didn’t end up being assigned to a writer during the duration of the experiment. There are currently two items remaining in our eBay account. Act now!

Shown below: our Nutcracker with Troll Hair. Intrinsically appealing, right? To see it is to imagine owning it forever, displaying it under a glass dome, perhaps passing it down to your grandchildren. At least, that’s how I felt when I purchased it for this project. (more…)

Check it out. There are only three items remaining in Significant Objects’ eBay shop. Once the bidding for these objects ends, the Significant Objects experiment will be over…

But the Significant Objects project — of which the experiment was only the first (though critical) phase — will continue! As tentatively suggested in a few posts last week, we’ve decided to continue Significant Objects as a charitable fundraising effort. We’re busy lining up contributors (new and old) this week, and we haven’t yet settled on which charity we’ll be supporting. We might ask you to help us figure that out soon. (more…)

In the months before we published the 100th story in our Significant Objects experiment, many of you clicked on an author’s name — in the Contributors list, at the right-hand side of this page — and found yourself directed to an Object Coming Soon page. The page announced: “We haven’t posted this particular object, and its associated story, yet. But we will soon!” The following photo, taken in my living room, illustrated the Object Coming Soon page:

The stuff shown in this photo was collected one day in April 2009, at a thrift store in the Boston neighborhood of Roslindale, at a time when Rob and I were still figuring out the guidelines for what sorts of objects to purchase for the Significant Objects experiment. We didn’t always follow our own guidelines, but they went something like this: (more…)

Leftover.*

Just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for visiting, reading, and spreading the word about Significant Objects. Yesterday we posted our 100th and final (for now) story — one by Jonathan Lethem. We couldn’t be happier with how it’s all turned out. Although we launched without fanfare in July, last month some 18,000 unique visitors viewed over 130,000 pages. (This month, the flood of traffic actually crashed our server for a few days.) As of Friday we’ve auctioned off $118.95 worth of thrift-store junk for $3,391.51! Of course some auctions are still open; as we parse the final data in the days ahead, we’ll post our findings here.

Obviously we couldn’t have done this without all the great writers who contributed, all the bidders, and all the readers. Thanks so much!

[* To see what that box used to look like, go here.]

Coming up: As mentioned, we’ll be publishing some of our runner-up stories from the BBQ Sauce Jar Slate Contest, while we wait for the last of our auctions to close. We’ll also be gathering our data — and pondering the future. You still have time to obtain one of the original 100 Significant Objects, in our store.

Recent reactions from elsewhere: (more…)

Object No. 100 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jonathan Lethem, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $76.]

Listen, friend, forget about the bartender, you could wait all day in this dive, we might as well be invisible over here, I kid you not. Here, let me pour you a drink. No, really, I insist, it’s on me. I brought my own. Just swab out the dust and fingerprints with my shirttails, good as new. Love the way it claps down on the bar, gets your glands salivating, doesn’t it?

No, after you, I insist. My pleasure.

See that freaky little bird? That’s the state bird, my friend. The Missouri Hunt-and-Pecker. Never heard of ’em? Well, then I guess you’ve never been to Missouri, have you? Maybe passed through, didn’t get out of the car. Or changed planes in the airport, or went up in the Arch once, just to say you’d done it. But that’s not Missouri to me. St. Louis is the gateway, sure, but you want to know Missouri you need to drive a few hours into the corn, you want to visit St. Joseph, up through Maryville — skirt the Iowa border, though Iowa’s a sore point from where I sit. You need to get lost in Missouri or you never really were there in the first place. Even then you won’t be likely to meet the Hunt-and-Pecker unless you circulate a manuscript or two.

Manuscript, you heard me right. See, very few know it, because we keep it to ourselves, but Missouri is sick and silly with apprentice fictioneers, the whole state’s like one vast harrowed and furrowed MFA workshop. Why do you think the license plates call it The Show-Don’t-Tell State? (more…)

Object No. 99 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Edward Champion, has ended. Original price: $1.50. Final price: $56.]

The resilient ruffians ran away with the geisha’s canes just after she refused to perform a classless act. While it was true that the geisha dramatized the occasional lowbrow feat, befitting an object of her status, even she had her standards. She’d wobble her elliptical hips within a studded hula hoop forged from painful tungsten alloy. She’d gorge on great sticks of fire while her blind part-time assistant hurled jeweled daggers round her anatomical outline. And if wanton clients had serious dinero — particularly that shiny new oval currency with the Prince Albert piercing — she’d even flash a bit of flesh, relishing her total control over the crowd. The bobbled harpies working the onyx alleys could hike up their skirts for a sou, but she knew every sector on her body was insurable and she remained committed to securing the compensation befitting her curvy carapace. It hadn’t been easy to work her way up from the snowbound steppes without a rep, but she stage-managed her prestige through her divine Venetian valet de chambre.

However, she needed her two canes to get around.

Now wobbling atop a safe surface, the geisha ruminated upon the false proposition with unintended consequences. The three men had imparted intent to pay serious cash, approaching her with necktie paradoxes she decided to disregard. The geisha asked what they would like, shifting her harsh all-business larynx into a soothing dulcet tone. One claimed that his nether enormity was so round and imposing that it confounded the sensors scanning allplace from space.

“Don’t speak like that to a lady!” snapped the trio’s ringleader, who slapped the boor with a mesh metal glove and jabbed him in the anatomical vicinity of recent boasts. (more…)

Yesterday I said we had an idea for Significant Objects Volume 2 — or at least the start of an idea. In a nutshell: What if we had writers invent Significance for a new set of objects, this time with the cumulative proceeds going to charity? I like to think of this as the “selling crap for a cause” strategy.

On the practical side, we still have a number of yard-sale and thrift-store objects that we obtained for the original S.O., but that were not chosen by anyone in that group of writers.

More important: We did not anticipate writers volunteering to participate in our project, but a few dozen did! This would give us all a chance to read their stories.

And believe me, we also did not anticipate, when we started our initial experiment, that we would find so many enthusiastic readers (whether they chose to bid or not).

So for instance we might pick a set number of objects, or set time frame, and all the auction proceeds from that batch/period would go to a single charity (to be named). That way, even though our initial experiment has ended, and the S.O. 100 remains intact, the stories could keep coming — and it would all be for a good cause!

What do you think? Should we give it a shot? How might the S.O. evolve as we go? (more…)