Whatever sells: Museum pairs celebs, eBay
The Fed Ex packages began to roll into the Shelburne Museum last month: vintage
What museum director Stephan Jost and his staff got in the mail now makes up an unorthodox new exhibition titled "Got
"Got eBay?" plays on the notion of collecting. Electra Havemeyer Webb, who founded the Shelburne Museum in 1947, was a notorious pack rat, acquiring not only trinkets and paintings but houses, barns, and the 220-foot steamboat Ticonderoga, all of which sit on the museum's 45-acre campus just south of Burlington.
"It's a little shticky," Jost acknowledged. "But that's OK. As if motorcycles at the Guggenheim, or Paris fashions at the Museum of Fine Arts isn't a little shticky."
Jost came up with the idea for the show last fall while at lunch with a museum trustee. To make it work, he knew he had to attract some celebrities for the cause, so the director and his staff networked like college seniors about to hit the job market. The museum recruited Seinfeld through the comic's wife, Jessica, a Burlington native. Jost signed up Carter Foster, a curator for the Whitney Museum of American Art, whom he knew when they both worked in Ohio. Foster, in turn, hooked up the museum with the New York-based Lurie and with New York real estate mogul Beth DeWoody, another of the collectors. DeWoody knew Jagger and called her . The roster of bidders expanded to include Douglas, Lepage (a Shelburne native), and the team of Quy Nguyen and Fritz Karch, two editors at Martha Stewart Living. There is a total of eight collections.
For Foster, the eBay collecting process was relatively easy. Foster purchased 50 American high school yearbooks, dating from 1911 to 1995 and representing most states. He collects yearbooks on his own.
"I thought about buying drawings, because I've bought 19th-century drawings for myself on eBay before," Foster said. "But that sounded so obvious. Why not buy something more interesting? Plus, it's cultural material people can flip through and engage with in a way they can't with most objects in a museum."
Lurie's plan was wryly subversive. He listed two of his own prints on eBay and then bought them for $500 each. He did run the idea by Sam Ankerson, the Shelburne Museum's communications manager, before closing the deal.
"I didn't want to be rude," Lurie said. "To me, it's funny because it's such blatant self promotion."
Jost acknowledges that the museum hopes to draw a younger crowd than usual with "Got eBay?" The show is running alongside more typical exhibits such as shows on Shaker furniture and Early American paintings. Jost says he is concerned that a recent survey determined that the museum's average visitor is 56, 10 years older than in 1994.
And Jost says that even the process of creating "Got eBay?" exposed the technology gap between generations. Governor Douglas, for example, had never used eBay before. He relied on help from 22-year-old aide Carly Swanberg, who let him sign on with her user ID.
Jagger, the jet-setting former wife of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, said she's comfortable surfing through cyberspace, but not using her credit card there.
"I have a policy of never buying anything on the Internet, even though I use the Internet a lot," she said by phone from London. "I'm very scared of what happens to people who use their credit cards online."
The solution? Ankerson gave Jagger access to his eBay ID and credit card.
"For two glorious weeks Bianca Jagger and I were one in cyberspace," said Ankerson. "How many museum employees in northern New England can say that?"
Jagger, a human-rights activist and vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, took her task seriously.
"At first, I had no idea this was going to be such a complex undertaking, but I know I am one of those people who don't do anything in a flippant way," she said.
She proceeded to assemble more than a dozen objects she felt were connected to American history and human rights. There's a collection of speeches made by President John F. Kennedy, a DVD featuring Kennedy debating Richard Nixon, a JFK rocking chair reproduction, and Gun Digests from 1962 to '64. Jagger bought copies of Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man" and the Declaration of Independence, as well as an assortment of antiwar buttons. In addition to the Koran, she got a scroll fragment of the Torah and a Vatican edition of the Bible. And she bought a reprint of Andy Warhol's 1972 print "Mao" and the March 1974 Vogue issue with her posing on the cover wearing a rhinestone veil. She included that, she said, because "I wanted to be present at my installation."
DeWoody, the real estate executive, gathered four pieces of Lucite furniture as a memorial, "The Invisible Room," to her fiance, who died unexpectedly during the project. Seinfeld paired the Porsche posters with an early-1970s Heuer Camaro watch. And Nguyen and Karch bought 50 rocks and pieces of petrified wood with instructions on how to arrange them in a color palette.
As for Lepage, he put together an assortment of objects, including a piece of stained glass, skis, a golf club, and a bowling ball, all with personal meaning to him. And Douglas bought several Vermont-related items, including antique maps, an old Farmer's Almanac, and 19th-century copies of the Rutland Herald.
"It shows that e-commerce can occur in pastoral locations like Vermont, and I've talked a lot during the time I've been in office about a high-tech, 21st-century economy," Douglas said.
Beyond that, Douglas has another take on "Got eBay?" that has nothing to do with the state's modern economy.
"Once you get the hang of it," he said, "it's kind of fun."
"Got eBay? Celebrity Collections Created Online" is at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vt., through Oct. 28. 802-985-3346, shelburnemuseum.org
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com. For more on the arts, go to boston.com/ae/ theater_arts/exhibitionist. 