Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

  • AMMpro
  • AMM Fantasy Collecting Game
  • Podcast
  • Contact Us

Are Collectors Just Crazy Hoarders?

August 9, 2016 by Marion Maneker

Allan McCollum

Jonathan Jones uses the pretext of The New Museum’s The Keeper show on collecting to offer his own precis of what appears to be a basic human need that can be carried to unhealthy—or sublime—extremes:

The exhibition and these reactions suggest a new chapter in the history of collecting. The psychology of the collector seems more traumatised, anxious and defensive. The type of collecting the New Museum draws attention to tends towards the repetitive, and may be hard to explain to or share with others: amassing infinite numbers of the same thing suggests not so much an interest in the meaning or history of objects or a feel for their poetry as a need to surround oneself with reassuring familiarity. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” wrote TS Eliot.[…]

Collecting in modern art started as a flash of poetry, a dreamer’s compulsion. In the 1920s, André Breton and his fellow surrealists visited Paris flea markets to purchase strange objects that seemed to speak to them, to personify hitherto unrecognised longings. “Objects that can be found nowhere else,” as Breton writes in his book Nadja. “Old-fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse …”

The surrealist art of collecting is the very opposite of hoarding. It is the special, unique, magical object that draws the surrealist collector’s eye: a strangely shaped spoon, a glove, an old book. From such found objects the surrealists assembled dreamlike images. Joan Miró’s 1936 Object in New York’s Museum of Modern Art includes a stuffed parrot, a stockinged leg, an old map, a suspended ball and a derby hat. It is a collection that suggests intimate fantasies and elusive poetry.

Hoarders or collectors? Our frightened society has forgotten the difference (The Guardian)

More from Art Market Monitor

  • Sotheby’s Prints & Multiples = £4.3mSotheby’s Prints & Multiples = £4.3m
  • Asian Art Gets DefensiveAsian Art Gets Defensive
  • Let Saatchi Make You an Art StarLet Saatchi Make You an Art Star
  • Attendance Soars at MoMA & MetAttendance Soars at MoMA & Met
  • AMM Fantasy Game for London Imp-Mod SalesAMM Fantasy Game for London Imp-Mod Sales
  • Artnet's Online Auction Success Doesn't Impress NYTArtnet's Online Auction Success Doesn't Impress NYT

Filed Under: General

About Marion Maneker

LiveArt

Want to get Art Market Monitor‘s posts sent to you in our email? Sign up below by clicking on the Subscribe button.

  • About Us/ Contact
  • Podcast
  • AMMpro
  • Newsletter
  • FAQ

twitterfacebooksoundcloud
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
California Privacy Rights
Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Advertise on Art Market Monitor
 

Loading Comments...