Everything Must Go

Glenn Adamson, Michael Diaz-Griffith, and Laura Doyle weigh in on inheritance, connoisseurship, and the market for old, beautiful things.

A cyanotype documenting a drawer at the Smithsonian, taken by the institution’s first photographer, Thomas Smilie (1843–1917). // Courtesy of the Smithsonian Archives via Flickr

By Sarah Archer

In the mid-1980s, fragments of orange plastic Garfield telephones began washing up on the shores of Brittany’s Iroise Coast in Western France, sometimes nearly who…