Significance of Objects

Every object has a story, right?  Objects carry the tales of where, who, when, what, and why.  This week my nephew, Aaron, sent me an eBay auction listing of one of my Grandmother’s needlepoint purses. I wondered who had owned it, and if they knew the story behind my Grandmother.  These people didn’t have the memory of seeing the colorful rows of silk fabrics, threads, and beautifully painted canvases.  And certainly, the purse didn’t evoke the memory of eating chicken salad with grapes on Melba toast while hearing the buzz of sewing machines above for them. So it got me thinking stories create value in objects. I wondered if anyone else had thought about this before.

Through a little research, I found an anthropological experiment that took 100 meaningless items rounded up from thrift, stores, yard sales, and flea markets costing a mere $128.74 to show the effect of narrative on any given object’s value.  Researchers recruited 100 writers, comedians, storytellers, and almost anyone they believed had great creativity.  Each storyteller took one item, wrote a story, and the team posted the ad on eBay.  Each listing included a note explaining the significance of the object had been invented by a storyteller; therefore, no one was deceived in thinking the object had significantly more value. The result was a profit of over $3500.  What became most fascinating about the experiment was that the project itself became a story, one that became co-created. The objects of significance became a souvenir of the experiment. 

This experiment then spawn an “object slam”, where audiences invented competing stories about an insignificant object.  Expanding even further, the idea became a Museum exhibit, demonstrating human-object communications. The entire string of events was amazing me, further demonstrating how humans are homo narrans, each of us deeply ingrained with the human propensity for story-telling and its value.