The story behind Significant Objects.

I’ve long been suspicious of what I like to call the really expensive handbag racket. A total sucker for the buttery soft leather and shiny hardware, but suspicious of the inexplicable cost nonetheless. It seemed like one day there were cute purses available for reasonable prices—a $150 Coach bag was a real splurge. Then Marc Jacobs and the like came along and bam! Every pocketbook on the market had to be big, bold, and at least $300 bucks. Prices have continued to rise right along with our collective obsession with having the next “it” bag, or at least a decent knock-off.

Little did I know that the same explosive economics could happen when you mix literature and tchotchkes. Enter SignificantObjects.com. Started by Rob Walker (a journalist and author who’s niche seems to be tracking American consumption and our obsession with "stuff") and Joshua Glenn (who celebrates the magical significance people give to otherwise insignificant things in his book Taking Things Seriously), the site is the perfect web experiment in storytelling and consumerism.

Walker and Glenn scour flea markets and thrift stores for the cheapest and oddest of artifacts, like a bowl made of popsicle sticks or a multicolored tin ark. Things you would think twice about paying a few bucks for. Then they invite seasoned writers to invent a short story to go along with each object. Stories and objects are put up for sale on eBay to test their new “value” on the market—the idea being that either the invented “history” of the object, the notoriety of the project, or the star quality of the writer can impart value to something that would otherwise most likely be the next day’s garbage.

The summer when I was nine, Mom bought boxes and boxes of popsicles on sale, lemon-lime, some discontinued brand. They looked like fluorescent jaundice on a stick, but they tasted sharply sour-sweet, and I loved them.”

– Sara Ryan, SignificantObjects.com guest author

The project raises interesting questions about consumerism and the weight we impart to things that are inherently worthless. It certainly teaches us that market value can be successfully based on intangible, invaluable traits—all of the SignificantObject items together have netted $329.33, nearly 15 times the original investment cost of $20.53.

Maybe that’s not a huge profit margin for a refreshing collection of original short stories, but it seems a bit excessive for nutcrackers with troll hair and spotted dog figurines. What it proves is that some “thing” is really only as valuable as you and the masses deem it—and that worth is truly relative. Makes you think again about buying that oversized brown leather satchel with gold buckles, no?
 

For more info: Read about some other experiments in storytelling here and here.