eBay: Large old weathered Tiki mask

Just thought this was worthy of note. Old Tiki mask, obviously weathered. Seller says he bought at resale store that was going out of business in Oxnard, California. No other info. Mask has nice aged look.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/151613709812

That's one of dem dar Mexican tikis.

Nicely weathered, yeah...“very old tiki head”…I feel like that sometimes :)

Not worth 369.- clams. Which brings to mind something I have been thinking about for a while: That, with all the Tiki carvings out there, good, cool Tiki MASKS are kinda rare. Yet there must have been a real demand for them. O.A had a nice line, but these cheap Mexican import masks dominate - even in otherwise cool Tiki temples, like here at the original Tropics Palm Springs:

Was it the case that, just like today with the cheap Poly-Asian import crap, these masks were so inexpensive that they overwhelmed and suppressed quality mask carvings?

Beautiful photo, bigbro! And good question. Don't have the answer, but we've been thinking about this lately, too, remembering some of the masks we saw at the Kahiki, and the few that we have from there actually seem African (especially with the red and yellow paint, and the elongated oval shape of the "face") and not Polynesian at all.

The other thing that came from Mexico back in that time are those heavy, carved wood frames. We like them. Don't know if they were copies of anything else or something unique to Mexico (or Spain, perhaps), but certainly from Mexico most of them came...