I've often pondered the strange disconnect between art collectors and producers. Having had the collector mentality first, I think I understand it. Having acquired the producer's mindset, however, I'm not as sympathetic to the collector anymore and would like to spend a little time analyzing it both for my own benefit and, I hope, for yours.

When I was a kid, I collected everything. The mania began with a postshard I'd picked up on my way to school. Because it was just a piece of something and embossed with a fancy-looking design, it had to be old - and valuable perhaps. Unfortunately, my mother encouraged this delusion and set me off on a many-year's adventure. (I persisted in thinking that the potshard was ages old and made by Chickasaw Indians when, in fact, it was just a piece of something that had been in someone's yard and been
broken.) I still have that postshard somewhere. No collector ever gives anything away and grieves for each and every loss, no matter how trivial.

Then came fossils and arrowheads; other rocks and minerals; bird's eggs; stamps; coins; baseball cards.
My room was an orderly riot of collectibles, circa 1965. In that day and time, you didn't have access to the sort of stuff a child does, with the click of a mouse, today. I had to wait, every summer, to go to the Evansville Museum for my mineral fix. I had to save my money and send off for little bitty rock-samples that were glued to a postit thingy and identified at the bottom. The legend there said what the rock was and where it came from. I lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where there were no interesting rocks and minerals except in buildings, which you had to leave alone. The vast majority of the most stunning rocks and minerals in the whole US of A seemed to be in Arizona. I would complain bitterly about the horrid privation of being a Memphis, and not a Phoenix, boy. I had to make do, and that was a valuable, if deeply unsatisfactory, lesson to learn.

I hit the "Tilt" button with baseball cards. By that time, I had the accumulator's mad-skills: I could identify, label, box, and categorize. I could put my collectibles in a safe place, but get at them quickly. I could also whisk them away in record time if I perceived a threat at the door, or heard an insistent parental voice bidding me to do something that would bore me to tears and thereby build character. As I got new baseball cards, I'd fold them gently into the older ones - or just contemplate them in magnificent isolation. I once came into some old, old cards from the previous decade and pored over them separately, not needing the rest at all. I'd not heard of some of the players and absorbed their stats with an acolyte's patient curiosity. Having put this new information in perspective, I'd introduce the old cards - the old players - to the newer, active ones and sit around admiring them all together. I'd organize the cards by teams, positions, leagues. I'd create hierarchical designations and essentially make up my own Hall of Fame. I could busy myself with baseball cards for a whole summer and keep the antic flame by inventing new and exciting combinations that were even more complicated than the ones before, through the winter months. Then it would be spring again and all the new ones would be out!

Believe me: I know what the collecting mentality is like.

When I discovered literature - which is, to a certain extent, the art of collecting stories - I realized that you didn't need anyTHING to participate. All you had to do was to read other writers and pay attention. You'd eventually imbibe enough material of your own to start writing, if you cared to do that. The stuff you HAD was immaterial. Books you could get and then give away. Writing supplies: well, you could find them almost anywhere. So I jumped from being a collecting junkie to a sort of spiritual plateau that didn't need anything but constant enrichment from sources that were largely unseen.

With painting, you need stuff, but you're traveling on the same road writers do. It isn't really the painting (or whatever it is you make) that's important. It's what feeds it. If you've got that, you can make more paintings than you'll ever know what to do with, let alone sell.

Collectors come from the place I used to be in and I find the infantile acquisitiveness of many of them very tiresome. The most annoying is the type that must have one of everything. (I know what that's like. I had to have the whole team or I'd have fits!
Believe me, it's the same damned thing.) You'll go through a typical collection of this sort and remember nothing - unless the collector acquired something good by accident. This is a very common sort of art collection and gets unduly recognized because there's a lot of stuff in it. Yet it is mostly worthless and bears no personal imprint at all.

The second worst type of collection has merely bad work. The collector is like the untalented musician who can play the notes, but is not musical. He or she will have bland, uninspiring pictures and sculpture that's been recommended by various dealers and there will be a lot of it and none of it will be much good.  This sort of person also gets undeserved recognition because he or she also has a lot of stuff and we like a lot of stuff in this country.

I think the worst affliction of the undistinguished collector is name-itis. He or she will collect the name of the artist, in which case the picture is a sort of by-product, not of the man (or woman), but of this completely arbitary, though symbolically charged, attribute by which we instantly know a Picasso or a Dali (even if we don't know diddly about his work.) Some of these names may well produce excellent work, so these annoying ACCUMULATORS will get something good fortuitously. But they don't mean to and they really don't deserve to have it. I fully realize it's absurd not to recognize that purchasing power is power indeed and gives anybody who has it access to almost anything whether it's "deserved" or not. Yet being a sort of justice-seeker in my spare time, I am personally engaged by the notion of deserving. And I will say it again: these people don't deserve the good stuff they happen, by accident, to possess. These people could buy something worthwhile, but unfortunately, they buy signatures.


A good collector operates not only from a personal aesthetic, but from a sense of discovery. He or she will see something and it will begin to exert an irresistible fascination. The collector will often not know the name of the artist because, at this level of intellectual independence, it won't matter who the hell the artist is. He or she will go see the painting (or whatever) over and over again, and then, with a forced sense of calm, slap down the money. Or:  he or she will see the thing and know that's it, that's what I want, let's get it! In French, this is called a "coup de foudre" and it's more than just love at first sight. It's a heart-tremor and a soul-dusting. It gets inside of you and it won't go away.

After a while, this thing becomes just a piece of artwork that's hanging somewhere, but at the time of its discovery the world is fresh and new, the sensibilities are at least temporarily heightened, and everybody advances to the next square on the board.
Collecting is good for you if you don't take the object itself so seriously.

On the other hand, some objects should be taken more seriously than others - and they're not necessarily the ones a lot of the "experts" dub irreplaceable.  These "experts" are often as deluded as any short-sighted person, tied as some are to a personal/political agenda. Best to prevail - or screw up - independently. In collecting, as in everything else, tomorrow is another day.

I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to have stuff that meets one's personal standards of excellence. Such standards also change. I didn't know anything when I started out. I just got whatever pleased me. Over time, I began to scope out certain nuances, establish preferences; I got to know both "the field" and myself. I developed a certain open feeling, with elements of: "Okay, show me!" and "No, I don't think so" as well as: "I'll do anything to get this."

I also went through both the "name-itis" and the "one-of-everything" stages. Everybody who isn't spectacularly endowed with talent and judgment absolutely must.

Any sort of growth requires that skins are sloughed off so that other, more durable stuff may grow on top of them. In collecting, the process of sloughing-off is continuous. No REAL collector ever thinks he or she is "done." If collecting is to be a real adventure, it must be pursued with this take-virtually-no-prisoners attitude. I think the urge to collect should also be sprinkled with scholarship, embellished with idiosyncrasy, and redeemed by a sense of responsibility to the community within which a given collection is seen and appreciated. If the collector is interested in self-aggrandisement, there is no community feeling.
It is egotistical and is dedicated to achieving recognition at the expense of everything else. This type of collector will build a wing at the museum and desposit "important" holdings inside of it. Some of these holdings may be worthwhile, but in most cases they were acquired in a competitive spirit which, in my view, is anathema to the spirit of collecting. If you collect to trump another collector, you are, in my opinion, lost. Collecting in this context is just ostentatious movement, another social grace to trot out, a negative raison d'etre. It is trophy-hunting of the most obnoxious sort.

The genuine collector is a serious human being who knows that creating art is a process that interests other serious human beings and is not merely the pursuit of valuable "properties." There is always real estate for that. Or just gambling, which is frankly about winning (you lose in gambling only because you're trying to win) and nothing else.