#Mushroom #Collectibles #Market #Stop #Mushrooming #WorthPoint
Mushrooms have been everywhere in the art, antiques, and collectibles world for the past 5 years or so. From antique Tiffany mushroom lamps to Sears Merry Mushroom canister sets to Takashi Murakami mushroom art, there is no escape from both buyers and sellers of funky fungi collectibles. Will the mushroom madness market ever soften? Read on to learn where this fungal fun originated and where it’s going.
Lewis Carroll, the OG Funky “Fungi”
Mushrooms have always been a pop culture phenomenon, thanks to their weird shapes, quick growth during dampness, and all sorts of medicinal, hallucinogenic, and even poisonous properties. Mushrooms are truly fascinating, no doubt about it.
Regarding fungi really gaining widespread attention, we can thank several mid-to-late 19th-century tomes full of mushroom illustrations for encouraging Victorian wonders in the world of mushrooms. During that period, people were accustomed to large books filled with illustrations of more common subjects from the natural world, such as mammals, birds, and flowers. However, some of the early books containing color lithographs of mushrooms introduced readers to a previously unseen and somewhat eerie world of fungi. No doubt Lewis Carroll saw one or two of these treatises before penning his classic 1865 Alice in Wonderland, complete with the hookah-smoking caterpillar perched on a giant mushroom.
Mushroom Clouds, Mantango, & Timothy Leary
The lure of all things mushroom continued into the 20th century, thanks to the dawn of the science fiction genre in both print media and film. Eleanor Cameron wrote several seminal shroom books in the 1950s, including The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, where two young lads and their chicken sidekick Mrs. Pennyfeather rocket into space to discover the planet Basidium, which is not only covered in tree-size mushrooms but also populated by classic little green men. What could go wrong, really?
As the mid-century era petered on with world war fears involving nuclear bomb “mushroom clouds,” next thing you know, Japanese director Ishirō Honda released the 1963 horror film Mantango, where a cluster of island castaways make the bad decision to eat a bunch of mutagenic mushrooms. Oddly enough, they’re looking frighteningly similar to victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings (yes, this made the film almost banned in Japan).
After Mantango, there was no stopping the mushroom madness with the rampant hippie culture of the 1960s, complete with Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary advocating the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms to “expand the mind.”
Mushrooms were now firmly implanted in pop culture and here to stay.
Mail-Order Sears Merry Mushroom
In the 1970s, mushrooms were in every home kitchen, thanks partly to the Merry Mushroom collection introduced by Sears Roebuck in 1970. This classic design was sold exclusively in their catalog, with everything from canisters to juice glasses and clocks available to the connoisseur of all things fungal.
Many of the collectibles we see today in antique markets across the country were influenced by this seminal collection, as other manufacturers quickly followed the early 1970s Sears mushroom trend.
Mushroom Girls in Love, Takashi Murakami, & The Last of Us
The following ten or twenty years saw a bit of a lull in mushroom popularity, just about until the 1990s or early 2000s when mushrooms again started popping up in the comic book, graphic novel, manga, and even contemporary art worlds. I bet you’ve never heard of Mushroom Girls in Love by Kei Murayama, but you probably have heard of Takashi Murakami.
Murakami is a contemporary artist known for his “Superflat” theory and factory-produced paintings of smiling flowers and mushrooms, now oft-reproduced into everything from t-shirts to waffle makers. Thanks to both this easy-to-visually consume cartoonish mushroom imagery and a country gradually relaxing cannabis consumption laws, next thing you know, every millennial and Gen Z kid wants vinyl mushroom stickers to slap on their Hydro Flask or Macbook.
Mushroom culture is thriving again, with the extra reminder of mushrooms’ mysterious appeal from binge-watched shows such as 2023’s The Last of Us, which show what the world would be like after a mass fungal infection transforms people into flesh-eating zombies.
Funky Fungal Fascination: Here to Stay
Today, these same millennial and Gen Z kids are some of the greatest shoppers for the resale and vintage markets as they try to limit consumption of all those new, poor-quality goods arriving at ports daily on container ships. Vintage mushroom goods check all the boxes for these buyers: reusing/recycling, fun visual appeal, connection to the natural world (thank you, Victorian era), a bit of naughtiness with the drug references, and, of course, the continued mysterious properties of mushrooms, from trippy to deadly.
Mushroom culture is here to stay, so resellers and buyers should continue taking advantage of 21st-century funky fungal fascination—at least for now.
Amy Moyer is the proprietor of Antmuffin: Art, Antiques & Collectibles. She holds a B.A. in Visual Art from Brown University and lives in Boston.
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