In Justification of a Personal Thrift Store Painting Collection.

If your guilty pleasure is the portion of Antiques Roadshow episodes where some self-important overweight middle aged white folk, who have stood in long cattle going to slaughter lines, in oppressively humid conditions with a cane in one hand and a bag with their overly wrapped precious heirloom in the other. When they finally get to the exam table the ceramics expert has some bad news for them: What was miscommunicated to them from who ever they inherited it from that the heirloom was given to a relative by such and such and had a history going back to the early 1800’s but turns out it was surely made for the tourist trade in the 1930’s and is worth on a good day $25 US dollars.

I reduce the event of finding a Rembrandt needle in the thrift store haystack to an example of mere luck at being at the right place at the right time I am confident that I would at least know the quality if not the significance of any particular needle. Though as fond as I am in seeing those Antique Roadshow “loser rounds” I am self assured that I would not been fooled, and would have seen the obvious cheesiness in the craftsmanship.

For all the deep problems a Thriftstore addiction brings and if it is an addiction like David Foster Wallace says