bric-a-brac

Mr. Redden, who specialized in rare manuscripts, collectibles, memorabilia and celebrity bric-a-brac — and also in generating excitement around such objects, turning auctions into high entertainment — died on May 11 at his home in Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y.

It is a realistic, down-to-earth police procedural that’s swarming with supernatural beings and lots of storytelling bric-a-brac.

Even if we had never seen or heard Jackson before, she seemed to reside in the dusty bric-a-brac of our country’s collective unconscious: one of rock ’n’ roll’s forgotten pioneers, Cordell Jackson had been making music for more than half a century.

Every design tells some kind of story, but American antiques — from the mythmaking around Betsy Ross’ flag at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876 to Bicentennial bric-a-brac — are particularly freighted with meaning, and that meaning is continually being remade, said Thomas Denenberg, the director of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.

Essentially, he adds, “I did a ton of schooling to return to what I was doing as a kid, burning my Transformers and making new materials out of the quotidian bric-a-brac in front of me.”