Courtesy Sotheby's

James Zemaitis, front left, at Sotheby's in 2006 beside Marc Newson's Lockheed Lounge (1986)

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James Zemaitis, head of Sotheby's 20th-century design department in New York, sounds off on a few of the contemporary scene's brightest and most buzzed-about designers.

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I’m shifting to a model closer to the upper echelon of the Old Masters and antiquities markets. It’s more about provenance.

Name a collecting opportunity.

Early modernist chairs are astonishingly affordable but require significant connoisseurship because of the difficulty in determining their provenance, in terms of whether they’re second series, third series. It’s still incredibly easy to put together a great collection of Marcel Breuer or Mies van der Rohe. Gerrit Rietveld is exploding, and Hans Wegner — while many of his chairs are susceptible to mass production, you get great bang for your buck if you understand condition, provenance and age. As for contemporary, in this day and age there are no easy opportunities. That market has become too beholden to the limited-editions vibe.

And what about limited editions?

The problem is no one knows which editions have really sold out and which haven’t. In the limited-editions market, the fair mentality actually drove the auction world, because at the fairs, the dealers were pricing these designers ever more astronomically. I remember going to Design Miami in 2007 and looking around at numerous pieces that were being priced between $100,000 and $200,000 and thinking, "Who are these guys?" These were designers who were not yet ready for prime time.

Despite the market’s flaws, is there cause for optimism?

I still believe that the future is with 20th-century design. We have a larger depth of bidders than, unfortunately, our colleagues in earlier French and English and American furniture do. And I still see exuberant bidding wars over fresh pieces that are hard to find. What’s great about America is there is so much great postwar design that is in the original ranch houses out there and that’s being consigned. Tiffany lamps are being found on the Antiques Roadshow. The fresh material is there, but it’s up to the auction houses to say no to everything else.

"Conversation With James Zemaitis" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2009 Table of Contents.