As if I needed further excuses not to finish the family memoir that I’ve been working on for years here comes Google Lens. You hold your phone camera up to anything from an antique porcelain figurine to a house plant, click, and, using AI, the app will identify the object in question. It will also courteously connect you to shopping opportunities related to your query.
Since our home is awash in antiques I could probably entertain myself looking stuff up from now until doomsday. For bringing this curse into our house I blame an amiable antiques dealer who was simply paying a friendly visit — with perhaps an eye to consignment opportunities — and who alerted me to the technology.
Allow me to offer a few examples of how it works. With a caveat. It often takes several tries to get the right information. And sometimes it never does. I own an illustration by cartoonist Drew Friedman. It ran alongside a 2002 story I wrote for the New York Observer about the trial of Alfred Taubman, a shopping mall magnate who at the time owned Sotbeby’s. Taubman was on trial for a price-fixing scandal together with rival Christie’s. Sotheby’s CEO Diana Brooks testified against him. Hence the illustration of Brooks delivering Taubman’s head on a silver platter.
Google first identified the characters as Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev. The second time I tried Google told me the two were people in a kitchen who weren’t celebrities and couldn’t be named from public information. Never did it come up the correct answer.
The most impressive response, though not all that impressive, came when I focused my phone’s camera on one of my orchids. This specimen has failed to blossom for a couple of years even though it appears healthy and I feed and water it regularly. I was even considering repotting it, though to what end I’m not sure since I know nothing about orchids. But within the last few weeks the promising insinuation of a stalk has emerged from its profusion of leaves.
I didn’t want to get my hopes up. Orchids produce ghostly aerial roots that seem to serve no useful purpose. In searching for the name of these tendrils I learn that they’re not useless but actually absorb water, nutrients and assist photosynthesis. When I held the camera up to the plant in question it gave me its name — Phalaenopsis — and told me that my plant looked healthy and the new growth that I observed was a flower spike. It previously told me the plant appeared distressed and didn’t notice the spike. AI’s opinion, at least as far as plants and cartoons are concerned, seems to require a large box of coarse Kosher salt and to be informed by the angle at which you shoot.
The technology’s greatest potential for providing happiness or disappointment is when it comes to valuations. Since I happened to be visiting my plants in the only bathroom in the house that gets direct sunlight (so what if Google chides me that indirect light is preferable for orchids) I opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out a carved ivory figurine for identification.
I said we have lots of antiques. This particular medicine cabinet is home not only to the expected deodorant, after shave and grooming devices but also to an impromptu collection of Asian art. It’s actually three connected mirrored cabinets so there’s room for everybody. The object in question appeared to be a miniature ivory yak or some close relative and it was nestling in a black lacquer stand that seemed made for it.
Where did it come from? How should I know. I know the provenance of about 1% of the objects in this place. My hunch was that it was a netsuke. I became aware of these small intricately carved objects while reading Edmund de Waal’s superb family memoir The Hare with the Amber Eyes and wondered if that’s what this was? The Nazis confiscated virtually everything from the wealthy Ephrussi family except for its hidden collection of 264 netsuke.
The Google app informed me that it was indeed a netsuke of a recumbent cow and found one that was almost identical on a Viennese auction house’s website. It was valued at between twelve and twenty-four hundred Euros but remained unsold. There should be a word to describe the rush, the cheap thrill — maybe cheap thrill is the word — you receive when you discover that you own something of alleged value according to the Internet.
One more example, there’s an antique Marxophone — a zither played with metal hammers — that’s been part of our household since my grandparents day. I ran that through Google AI and was pleasantly surprised to find it valued at $1,200. But just as I was about to celebrate I scrolled further down the page and found the identical device offered on other websites at $400 and $40.
I’m not sure what the moral is. Except, perhaps, that I ought to get back to work.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
