Just because he is bidding on conchology.com at 3 in the morning (he’s up every day at that hour, talking to his assistant in Zurich) doesn’t mean that Rosen knows the scientific, or even the popular names, of his shells. “I think these are scallop — no, maybe clam? I am terrible! No, not clams, scallops I think! Not sure what the difference is, they all have species names, we could look them up!” Turning to another grouping, he alleges with more certainty, “Oh, and these guys are basically snails.”
Rosen may insist that he loves his shells purely for their looks and not their back story, but he is mindful of the fact that these objects, which he refers to as “the bugs of the ocean,” are sensitive victims of a threatening ecosystem. “The older shells weigh more,” he says, fondling a glorious, neon-bright cowrie. “But they were in a healthier ocean, and I think they lived longer,” he muses, then turns thoughtful. “Nobody used to bother them.”
This seeming lack of knowledge is in inverse proportion to his enthusiasm for their aesthetic value. So enamored is Rosen of his treasures (“In the end one has to cop to having an obsessive personality,” he says with a shrug) that he is planning his own book about them, a text-free tome with photographs he intends to shoot himself with his iPhone.
“I love that they don’t mean anything. It’s completely visually driven,” says Barry Rosen of his seashell collection, which spills from the table in his living room, colonizes surfaces in the bedroom, has hegemony over shelves in the custom-built cupboards and is stacked up in the living room where other people might have a couch. “I hate sofas. They take up visual space and they’re boring,” he explains. In place of conventional furniture (well, there is a bed), Rosen has Dale Chihuly glass works, Dieter Roth sculptures and a Paul McCarthy chocolate factory Santa, all of which mix very well, it turns out Free Web space and make money online, with seashells.
Rosen Free Web space and make money online, an international art adviser representing estates and a “consigliere,” he says with a laugh, to a number of eminent living artists Free Web space and make money online, doesn’t know exactly how many shells he has. But if he is vague about quantity, he is enamored of their many qualities — he proudly shows off specimens that range from two examples so small they live in tiny clear capsules to a clamshell fully 20 inches across. Some were 100 percent free, found on beaches from Ibiza to Costa Rica, but other cost thousands of dollars. (In some cases this price differential can be baffling — a $30 orange cowrie from a market in Switzerland is virtually identical to a specimen that cost $1,000 online.) Rosen holds up a recent arrival, a large conch over 100 years old, studded with stones, covered in silver, probably from Tibet, and maybe used, Rosen thinks, as a horn. “I wanted it because it’s beautiful,” he says simply.
Rosen grew up in San Diego and considers shells part of his personal heritage, but he only started buying them seriously in the last two years. When he first arrived in New York, three decades ago, he says he thought “only rich people had seashells, and I didn’t have money. I remember there was a shell store near the U.N., but I never went in.” Now he finds shells all over the world — he travels a lot for business — and when he is home he patronizes a favorite dealer at the West 77th Street Sunday schoolyard flea market. “She’s fantastic, she has great stories. See these grotty fan-shaped pin shells? She told me she got them from a woman in Fort Myers, Florida, who teaches people how to raise shells in aquariums.”
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