Issue 130: Ask Me Anything

How influential are podcasts? Should posh quartz be 'a thing'? Could a brand ever just start over again? Plus AP x KAWS, a real use for moonphase watches and more

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that if you duct tape it to a wall should easily sell for a few million. It doesn’t contain as much potassium though. What it says about the sanity of our world that a billionaire crypto-bro is happy to pay the price of a mansion for a snack thought-provoking comment on society I’m not sure; several horological memesters snarked that it makes spending six or seven figures on a watch seem positively rational. “Hold my beer,” as they say. The art world will always be bigger, nuttier and less comprehensible to outsiders, but there are plenty of people in Switzerland doing their best to close the gap. Unrelatedly… yeah, right… my thoughts on Audemars Piguet’s collab with KAWS are below. After that, the regular AMA: once again the Fourth Wheel audience has come up with the goods, and I’ve done my best to provide worthy answers. Enjoy!

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Do they know its Quizmas?

Last year I wrote a very long, and by all accounts, very difficult end-of-year quiz. Some people told me they loved it but mostly it was met with silence. I love writing them but my goodness it’s a lot of work, so my question to you is: do you want another one this year? Maybe a bit shorter, maybe a bit easier?

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The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Harrods Tudor Leaked: Details Confirmed
My Take On The Patek Philippe Cubitus
The Truth About Water Resistance
Why Can’t London Host A World-Class Watch Event?
The GPHG 2024 Results Analysed

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Kaws and effect

Anyone hoping Audemars Piguet under Ilaria Resta might pivot away from controversial collabs that test the watch elite’s capacity to indulge one of its true luminaries playing high-craft-low-culture should have known better. Not just because projects currently emerging from Le Brassus were set in motion by Francois-Henry Bennahmias; this is obviously true but any CEO can cancel a project if they don’t think it’s a good idea.

The ability to faithfully and painstakingly render an avatar or cartoon figure at the scale of a Royal Oak Concept is not the issue - it wasn’t the issue with the Marvel tie-ins and it isn’t the issue with the appearance of KAWS’ Companion under the sapphire of the latest limited edition, any more than the physical execution of the figures is what people care about when it comes to KAWS’s actual art. As

kingflum

wrote, it’s less about the quality of the work than the end result, comparing the watch scathingly to Michelin-starred chefs making McDonalds burgers.

It isn’t the first time KAWS has attracted comparisons with the fast-food giant. I’m not here to pass judgement on anyone’s individual taste; you might love KAWS and that’s your prerogative. But even his staunchest defenders would have to admit that he is an odd fit for haute horlogerie, an industry that ostensibly extolls the virtues of fine craftsmanship.

His work is dismissed by critics as devoid of depth and hidden meaning; it is nakedly commercialised without inviting comment on what it means to exist in a capitalist, commoditised society, as Warhol did (for example). He’s the street artist for people who think Banksy’s too intellectually challenging. His fans cite his accessibility and anti-elitism, but rather than a blue-collar integrity, I see a blandness, an almost wilful refusal to engage with the idea that art might convey meaning. He is almost supernaturally boring in interviews (I’ve read six in the last half hour, and gave up searching for a revealing quote or sense of what drives him). To his slight credit, KAWS expresses no particular happiness at the high prices reached for his work, but he’s not doing much to shrug off his reputation for “conceptual bankruptcy”. I’m not confusing watchmaking with fine art - watches are tools, after all, no matter how finely-decorated - but there is a dissonance between the disposable, replicable, synthetic, superficial world of a KAWS figurine and the importance we’re told to attach to a work of horology.

On another level, AP x KAWS was inevitable. He is less of an artist than a brand¹; a logo, a status-symbol, a powerful signifier in circles that I’m sure already overlap significantly with those of AP, Hublot and Richard Mille collectors. He has worked with Supreme, with Dior, with Pharrell and more. He’s bankable, hyped to the heavens, and for a watchmaker that sees itself as the provocateur of its peer group, the ideal match. It’s not by chance that Vacheron Constantin partners with the Louvre and AP does this. The one isn’t necessarily ‘better’ than the other - just two top tier brands that have each found their way of engaging with the art world.

In the short term, it will be another hit. You can’t argue with AP’s sense of what’s guaranteed to sell out. I haven’t really talked about it as a watch - is there much point? Is that what this is? - but the peripheral display, were I to encounter it elsewhere, would be the kind of thing I’d get interested in. In the long term, I wonder. Usually I fall back on the argument that if what you love about a brand still exists, you can turn a blind eye to this kind of thing, assuming it’s not your cup of tea, and enjoy your Royal Oak Jumbo, or Universelle, or ReMaster 02. It’s too knee-jerk to say that doing this trashes AP’s brand value - the Marvel collabs were way riskier, in my opinion - and we have to remember that only a year ago it scooped the grand prize at the GPHG for one of the most impressive watches many of us have seen in a very long time. Bennahmias had the ability to keep the two facets of Audemars Piguet’s personality - the outstanding watchmaker and the pop-culture magpie - in balance and steer the brand to ever higher planes. She may not have signed off on its inception but this collab emerges under Ilaria Resta, so it’s on her to continue the tightrope act. Several people, including Anish Bhatt, commented disparagingly about AP’s reliance on limited editions, with five released in the last month alone; this is another balancing act and given that several of the watches he cited were regional editions rather than full global releases, I think AP has things at a manageable level given that we are a month from Christmas in a fairly dour year. But with its big-ticket collabs, the brand is undoubtedly riding a tiger, and I find myself asking: Where does it go from here?²

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Ask Me Anything

What would you do to improve the GPHG awards? - Time.The.Destroyer on Instagram

If I had a pound for every time I’ve proposed fixes for the GPHG, I’d have… at least a fiver. The stuff that’s been discussed recently - removing the pay-to-play structure, changing the criteria for entry, bringing a more global and dare I say professional approach to the broadcasting and marketing - I agree with wholeheartedly. There’s more you could do… put a greater focus on sustainability and transparency, perhaps, although you’d be accused of pushing an agenda and perhaps rightly so. You could rotate the Jury members and the Jury president a bit more robustly year by year, and you could continue to make tweaks to the process, but honestly, if it got to a point where all of the above happened I would say to its critics that this is as good as it’s going to get. Awards will always draw criticism, and for all that I happily engage with the GPHG, both in good faith as an Academy member and in a more critical vein here on TFW, it has only limited relevance. Winners should be proud, and for some brands it’s a huge deal, but even within this niche hobby most people will go about their lives untouched by the results and that’s probably the healthy way to be.

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Do you have any idea of what kind of influence a podcast like Scottish Watches actually has in the market? I.e. not affiliated with a traditional media outlet. I’m not sure if I’d own my Fears or my Moser without some of the interviews they have conducted with the brand proprietors over the years, but I find it hard to quantify what’s actually significant about these types of podcasts. - Paul (timeeq) on Instagram

Well Paul, on one level you’ve answered your own question: if you’re actually buying watches based on your exposure to the brands on a certain media outlet, that’s the holy grail as far as they’re concerned. You are the case study every publisher dreams of! Whether Scottish Watches is having this effect on a wider scale, I have no idea - and probably neither do they.

Despite - or perhaps thanks to - us living in the age of the influencer, genuine influence and how it is wielded is a massively tricky question to answer. To a certain extent it was ever thus, because even the most switched-on consumer is never fully aware of how, and why, they make the decisions they do. Now that potentially every individual measures themselves (online, at least) by their capacity to speak to others, we have industrialised the concept, but drawing a firm connection between exposure to a product or idea and a purchase is for obvious reasons almost impossible. Scottish Watches says it’s the number 1 watch-based podcast in the world, which has got to count for something…

You mention the relationship, or lack of it, with traditional media - I think what’s significant is that SW has a clear focus, i.e. to be good at podcasting, and isn’t trying to do three or four other things all at the same time. Some traditional media fall into this trap; others have also succeeded by being focussed. Podcasts - and to an extent, YouTube falls into this statement too - are a bit unusual in that you are unlikely to be partially exposed to them. You either listen to them loyally, or they aren’t part of your life at all, whereas if you are interested in watches you probably dip in and out of magazines, newspapers, websites and other media and have a general awareness of their stature and significance.

One way to assess the impact of a brand, product, media outlet or whatever else can be to imagine a world without it. Would you miss it? Would the wider watch world miss it? It’s a line of thought that can keep even the most secure among us up at night, and I don’t think there is any media outlet that in isolation would have a significant impact on sales if it disappeared³, but I’d say SW has a sufficiently distinct voice that it would be missed.

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What is time? Ben, on Instagram

To quote the late, great Douglas Adams, “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

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I have a few questions… Jakub, via Substack chat

1. Do you think the established Swiss brands would like sometimes ditch their heritage and have a tabula rasa in terms of design, target audience, price? I have, among others, Breguet in mind, seeing how any attempt to refresh their image meets with the harsh opinions of their 'fans'.

In watchmaking, the past is everything. I mean that without exaggeration: if you are a mainstream brand with more than 50 years of history, everything you do is defined by your heritage. If you are a younger brand, you are going to set yourself up either to work in homage to those great traditions, or define yourself by your rebellion against them - but even in the latter case, you are going to be working within the parameters of mechanical excellence, technical ingenuity and hand-craft. There is no watchmaking but old watchmaking, because the idea of technological progress in personal timekeeping is entirely contrary to the concept of luxury. So the idea of a brand wilfully abandoning its most valuable asset - even if it isn’t currently maximising its potential, a la Breguet - is almost unthinkable. Brands love the phrase ‘evolution, not revolution’ - move too fast and you risk causing an upset. Bremont has upset fans this year by doing too much too fast, and yet you would have to say that actually, it hasn’t deviated so very far: it still makes tool watches for broadly the same audience it has always targeted. Sometimes a brand can pivot out of one market segment and into another - look at the way Louis Vuitton has abandoned its lower-priced designs and moved into a much higher bracket. But the overall brand a) hasn’t changed and b) is strong enough to support such a move. In fact, bringing the watchmaking upmarket was actually bringing it into closer alignment with the brand’s positioning in other segments.

I would like to draw your attention to a very recent example: Jaguar cars. Just this week it has unveiled a new logo, new creative campaign and teaser shots of a new car, ahead of a bold new brand strategy that will see it abandon mass-market design that competes with BMW and Mercedes in favour of high-end, EV-only design that competes with Porsche, Polestar, Bentley and maybe others. It might work; no-one I’ve asked thinks it’s going to, and the reaction on social media is predictably acidic. One individual, who has a lot of experience working with car brands in general and JLR in particular, said to me that if it doesn’t work, it could be the end of Jaguar. Those are the stakes when you tear everything up and start again.