^ The point of antiques is to decorate, and very, very, very few people want their homes to look like a small museum.
The 1960s was the last time it was still fashionable to decorate middle class homes in wannabe French Louis-whomever style, when the opulent style of previous decades and centuries was definitely abandoned. There are people who are a real mess, no matter their education and all that: I recall a Spanish architect, builder of mega modernist mega houses, who would mock at the inclusion of her mother's XVIIIth century French biscuits in the decoration of a room, everything just as white and luminous and discrete, calling them "Lladró" porcelain, and then say nothing about the garishly coloured, ghastly late-Medieval, commonly and very wrongly called Central European "Renaissance", hanging in a very visible wall in the same wide room.
At any rate, there are two elements involved: one the mere change in fashions, which also made people from previous centuries passing on magnificent objects which were too heavy or, simply, way out of style; then, and closely related to the previous onem there is also the component of the lack of discernment of the general population, who will just follow the habits and inclinations with which the times and entourage feed them, crushing whatever leaning they may have for anything not in tune with the fads of the times they are living and who, anyway, will consider the most superficial aspect of what they have in front of them, or the associations that their prejudices will make: for example, in mikey's pic (leaving aside the criminal contrast with the home fittings, and the monstrosity peeking to the right of the image) they won't appreciate the lines and general discretion of the table, only that it's "old style"... and also way too dark, something in what anyone may agree: people take "older" furniture for darker and older than they actually are, only because of the condition in which they find it for sale... and then there are the worse sort of barbarians, the sort who would prefer Rembrandt's Windmill in the filthier condition, before being restored, because they like the "romantic", melancholy veneer they attribute to dirty darkness.
Speaking of paintings, I am curious to know what sort of one-million-dollar painting people are passing.
