NPR’s Weekend Edition gets inside Michael Crichton’s art collection and explains how he lived with his works and what he needed to do to be sure he could own a work:
Crichton employed art handlers to change the placement of a painting in his house or to move it to a room with a different light. One of them, Owen Casey Rothstein, who works for Fine Art Shipping, remembers a painting by Claes Oldenburg that he moved at least seven or eight times. In Crichton’s home, he said, “you would take a piece off the wall, and the whole wall is just Swiss cheese. There are so many nail holes in the wall from moving art around, but you start counting, and you realize that easily 30 paintings were hanging at this particular spot.”
Everyone who knew him says Crichton moved the paintings to keep the works fresh in his mind, so they wouldn’t become part of the background. Another unusual aspect of Crichton’s collecting style, says Gorvy, was that when he would buy a work from a dealer, “he would ask if he could keep it over dinner. The delivery people were slightly confused by this, but his main motivation was that he wanted to see how to live with the objects, and he felt if he could sit and eat with the objects, he would know if he would enjoy it moving forward.”
