Charleston In My Time: The Paintings of West Fraser University of South Carolina Press, 2001

Because I prefer to have lived with an artist's work for a while and not be pressured to "sound off" about something I haven't at least tried to assimilate, I have reviewed this book from memory. I have not provided facts unless I was certain of them; the rest I have let alone. This review is not about a particular painting anyhow; it is about an artist's development; his strengths and flaws; his prospects and possibilities. I apologize for any factual errors
- or oversights.

Charleston in My Time is the sort of volume artist/producers dream about: it provides the artist an almost unlimited opportunity to strut his stuff; sets the stage for his development; and respectfully reproduces work from the most significant phases of his career. Very few living artists are favored with such a volume and I think West Fraser, the recipient of this honor, is duly sensible.

The book's "scholarly" approach, however, falls flat.
It may well be addressed to a provinicial audience keenly curious about the art and artists of the lowcountry, as I think rural South Carolina is known to its own people, but there isn't much to recommend it to a general audience. The art of South Carolina's past is - as everywhere - uneven in quality, but is perceived in this volume with an almost outlandish adoration. This sort of uncritical reverence might be seen as indigenous to Southern people - as it is. But it also speaks of a narcissism that might be pardonable in the collector, but has no place in the critical analysis of one's predecessors.

I would have preferred to hear more about the artist himself, perhaps in diary form or interview format.
He is allowed to provide some biographical information, but it is scant. The book is his; Fraser's artistic forebears are merely footnotes and should be treated as such. People are, in the main, curious not only about an artist's life, but his struggles and triumphs. Of these, the book gives us
dribs and drabs, but is mostly silent.

Just for the record: Fraser outdoes all the dead people, with the possible exception of Alice Ravenel-Smith, whose watercolors are drenched in a personal lyricism that transcends regional affiliation. She should be better known, and perhaps will be. Over the past ten years, there's been a great deal of grabbing going on. Dealers and curators from elsewhere might want to start grabbing up forgotten Southerners and start re-introducing them to their conceputally fogged audiences on either coast.

At its finest, Mr. Fraser's work is impressionist in color and realist in feeling. Even failed paintings have the attributes of impressionism: deep space, optical color, "picturesque" design. (The realist's self-critical detachment is, however, missing.) Mr.
Fraser started out in watercolor and worked largely from photographs. In these early watercolors he is for the most part literal, though he is occasionally redeemed by his genuine feeling for place as well as his spirited drawing and design. However, they are fatally flawed in their reliance on a photographic source and do not begin to approach his more mature integration of subject and seeing. However, there are some brilliant foreshadowings. I think he made an excellent decision (if it was that) not to turn to oil until he "got his chops" on paper. Everything he would do later on canvas, he more or less anticipates in his watercolors. Yet the watercolors for the most part lack the masterful spontaneity and suggested form of his best oils.

When he begins with oil, he lacks substance. He seems to be somewhat color-mad, unable to find his way into the form of his subjects. But as he begins to hit his stride, we begin to observe a shift from mere experimentation to a dawning sense of purpose. His very worst faults are mostly ironed out. When he hits his stride, he is able to create completely convincing, not to say breathtaking, illusions of a cityscape known largely for its old world charm; palm-fronded landscapes in which the air is felt; spectacularly vivid sunsets in which land and sky are fused both spatially and conceptually. There is no "girly girly romance", to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, about these paintings - even if they are, at bottom, "romantic." Fraser obviously loves his Low-country subjects as well as his adopted city - sanitized somewhat after Hurricane Camille swept through it. The book leaves off some years ago, but there's a suggestion of tremendous potential in his panoramic cityscapes, painted from a sweeping vantage point, like some of his early watercolors. His greatest cityscape is here, a magnificently constructed panorama of an old, but vital place we've come to know pretty well in earlier, more selective views. There is an astonishing unity here: of roof and steeple; apartment and townhouse; of color, light, and form. This creative fusion of visible phenomena is what landscape painting, from Constable to Wyeth, is all about and Fraser understands it very well.

Embarrassing, however, are titles that suggest bad Nineteenth-century poetry or overblown religious sentiments, as in "God's Golden Light" - otherwise an excellent painting. His figures are lopped-off humanoids whose blocky movements seldom lead anywhere.
There is a painting of a bunch of good ole boys, complete with Confederate flags, out on the bay in their motorboats. You might as well just wrap them all in white sheets and call it "Singin' Dixie."
There are slews of paintings of the merely picturesque that may hardly surpass the local talent. The worst of these paintings seem to shill the charm of the old city for tourists and other gullible outsiders. Some are downright bad and shouldn't have been reproduced.
I'm thinking of particular images here: of a pyramidal form in a graveyard; another of uncertain palm-like foliage done in feathery greens and puky lavenders.

To his credit, Fraser is rarely as bad as this and should not be judged by a few anomalous missteps.

He sometimes commits himself to series' that really don't require quite so much repitition. I'm sure he's aware of Monet's preoccupation with the fleeting effects of light on a particular subject and has wished to duplicate that experiment. In some cases, he pulls it off; in others, well, he doesn't. In this particular circumstance, the work should be selected carefully. Here very little care seems to be present.

When compared to a truly great artist, like Edward Hopper, who might also be identified with a particular place, Fraser falls short. One might liken his best efforts to Hopper's watercolors, also on-site explorations of a specific subject and impeccable in this regard. Fraser is a master of the sort of reflected light and color-drenched palette necessary to plein air painting. Fraser is fundamentally an eye-painter and not an artist in the sense that Hopper, or even Burchfield, was. He is a sort of masterful technician whose incredible bravura can often hinder an inner vision. He does not invent, he merely records. He has no vaulting imagination; his talent resides mostly in his eye and hand. He doesn't have the sense of the tragic any of number of his literary counterparts have had and can't, it would seem, endure scenes of poverty and human distress without sweetening them up and making them picturesque.

However, what Fraser can do well is considerable.
Witness the plethora of bad impressionist paintings that overflow Red State galleries. He is an excellent designer and an interpreter of light with few equals.
His forms look real; that is to say, they are rooted in something - are made of something. Painting tactile surfaces is also a considerable accomplishment. He can show you hard noon light on a plaster wall and make it stick in your imagination as the definitive interpretation. He is able show us what a deserted street in a good-time old town feels like, with its few electric lights and irrelevant church steeple. He'll guide you down a footpath toward a shack along some sandy road and you feel you're there, walking barefoot.

I would prefer a greater sense of the monumental, less emphasis on the picturesque, more empathy - for want of a better word. But within his limitations, Fraser is a very good painter indeed. And that is more than good enough. I'll take it over just about everything else there is in representational painting today.

Remember, however: I said almost.

Printmakers are a funny lot. I've always marvelled at their sub-specialty status in an art world that might wish to embrace them, not only for aesthetic reasons, but economic ones as well. That is to say, the work of very few living printmakers is out of the range of any art collector - and might easily be acquired by non-art collectors who are drawn to artist of subject for their own reasons. In a word, printmakers deserve better. It's as easy to collect prints as Star Wars memorabilia - and almost as cheap. Prints are fairly plentiful and only the most fastidious collector insists on an early "number." Most printmakers don't really give a damn about whether a collector owns 6/150 or the very last of the run. They are working artists for whom a check represents an opportunity to run out and make other images. Most have other jobs, work obsessively at their plates and drawing boards, and exhibit, mostly, with other printmakers. These unusually gallant people work in the shadow of the painters, sculptors, and video artists and don't seem to mind it.

Their sangfroid is commendable and might be emulated in other quarters.

Many of the best New York-area printmakers are represented in "Tides Lines: Prints of the Staten Island Waterfront" at the Noble Maritime Museum. I would like to take the opportunity to re-introduce
readers of this blog to one them.

My choice is entirely prejudicial and I would apologize for it if I thought it would do any good.
However, Bill Murphy is an artist whose steady, if fulsome, growth I have watched over the past fifteen years and I'm proud to have been able to look over his shoulder.

I met him at a gallery neither of us frequented - a co-op gallery in one of those fine old industrial buildings people were so crazy to live in twenty years ago. It had a roster of forgettable artists - a measure of honorable intentions: neither of us wanted to leave the area without seeing something, however mediocre.

The gallery was reached by a tortuous flight of stairs and had obviously been without visitors for a while.
If there had been a gallery sitter, he or she had absconded; we had the place entirely to ourselves. I don't remember the exhibit at all. Some co-op artists, then as now, deserve better too. It is a pity that the best of these are more or less blackballed (mostly by default) from commercial galleries that often promote lesser, but more saleable, talents. I think that's another reason why both of us hung in there. We identified with the people who were exhibiting in this gallery and other places like it - even if we were working feverishly to avoid their fate.

After taking a respectfully solitary tour of the exhibit, we retired to a coffee-shop where we started to compare thoughts. I was delighted (and relieved) to find another artist who didn't necessarily swoon at the mention of the smallish talents who were enjoying largish reputations at the time; intrigued by his independent-mindedness; cheerfully provoked by his resistance to some of my own half-baked notions about the world around whose peripheries both of us had little choice but to move.

I learned that Bill was from Staten Island - a place I identified with firemen and sanitation workers (a thing sadly borne out by the spate of funerals after
9/11.) He talked like a guy who might've strayed into business or real estate: a down-to-earth sort of guy whose more rarefied interests were tempered by a love of baseball that surpasses my own. To this day, he never fails to mention, in our emails, how the Mets are doing. (I boycott my home-team, the Nationals, because I would prefer to have fewer potholes on Capitol Hill than RKF Stadium spectator-crammed.) I told him that I'd seen some excellent drawings by him in a frame-shop on Lexington Avenue and wondered how he'd done with them there. (Hadn't done much, he
confessed.)

I would take him up on his invitation to visit his studio shortly afterwards. A word to the wise: it is best to go to Staten Island when you have an entire day at your disposal because it is an irresistible place to go for a five-hour walk. Even if you don't generally take walks like this, you will there.
Bill's mentor, John Noble, *walked around the place like mad and knew it better than anybody. His lithographs of the old waterfront life, with its moody infrastructure and proudly decaying tankers are among the most underrated bodies of work in the Twentieth Century. I would urge anyone for whom the genuinely romantic is not a despicable notion to look for the work of John Noble. His elegies to the world of "steam and sail" are poetic documents of a time that has - even on the Island itself - vanished completely.
Nor are they particularly expensive.

Like Noble, Bill has never seen any reason to leave Staten Island. He recently sold his citadel of a house in a marginal neighborhood and moved to another one - on the Island, of course! People know him there and are glad he's around - though he is not the art world celebrity it might be possible for him to be elsewhere. He teaches at Wagner College and is, I think, an esteemed and respected member of his profession. He's done a slew of portraits of college presidents, and will, no doubt, have done a complete set before too long. He's is as much part of his community as his Rutherford, New Jersey forebear, Dr.
William Carlos Williams.

I consider his artwork somewhat more subversive. His best prints are almost strident essays on our common mortality - he'll make a pile of old bricks in front of a big amusement park ride stand, in a symbolic sense, for all of us. He's accomplished, in a series of panoramic etchings, the nearly impossible: a sort of Staten Island timeline stretching back before human occupation to a our present era, in which man's imprint ranges everywhere - yet whether imprint exerts a benign, or malignant, effect is entirely up to the viewer. Bill records the notion of man as dangerous, however, in an intuitive way. His approach to a murky waterfront is marked not only by painstaking observation, but a lyrical steadfastness before which the less committed among us might stand aghast. His prints and watercolors of this once-teeming place accomplish the impossible in their capacity to illuminate the unseen while also - as Hopper said - sticking "to the fact." This dichotomy is also present in the work of Charles Meryon, the great French printmaker whose untimely death made a legend of his legend first, and his work second. This is unfortunate in that the work, in this case, was much greater than the man.

We rarely know our great artists when they're among us. They seem too ordinary; too approachable; "just folk," as it where. Do you think anybody ever gave a second thought to the round-shouldered man who spent so much time looking after The Globe Theatre? William Shakespeare was just a little guy who might've become an aldermen if he'd stayed in Stratford! Great. .
.but unremarkable? Inspired. . .but inconspicuous?
In Bill's case, these contradictions are mostly true.
He wouldn't give up his life as father and homeowner easily and, at present, nobody's asking him to. He hasn't finished with Staten Island as a place to watch
- though he's ventured into New Jersey lately - the scene of one of his best recent prints. Also into Coney Island, which is somehow as connected to Staten Island as it is to Brooklyn - where he sets up his easel often. Yet Staten Island is the staging-area for most everything Bill does and, like Constable's
soggy Deptford, is more than place enough for him.



* Bill remembers Noble differently. I will quote him.
"Sorta doubtful. he knew the old industrial area (Richmond Terrace) and how to gget to the Paramount Bar and Grill to Demyan's Hofbrau to Bayonne and his studio."

(The following is a partial, and certainly idiosyncratic, impression of the event. I did not take it all in because my cloudy vision isn't up to taking in a lot; tiny blood vessels start to throb and distend and, well, it isn't pretty. So I have cut the thing in half, ommitted a slew of excellent paintings, and have left out some people, like Charles Conder and William Stott of Oldham, who ought to be in here. I hope this maddens everyone with curiosity.)

In the midst of old friends, I feel a sense of comfort the new, and perhaps more dynamic, people in my life cannot supply. I study these old friends for cracks in the old facade, significant hair loss, hearing anomalies, and I still find them very acceptable.
Kurt Vonnegut suggested that we shouldn't entirely forsake those who knew us when we were young - and it's not a bad idea, in spite of what they may remember.

Well, I have always regarded Degas as an old friend of
mine: a cranky one, to be sure. A man never at a loss for the stinging sarcasm and the irreverant jibe, generally at my - or the world's - expense. A small price to pay for having such a fellow in one's embrace, as it were. Degas was certainly the most accomplished draftsman among his Impressionist colleagues. No: he was the only draftsman among them.
One looks in vain for preparatory sketches or schemata in the Impressionist oeurvre. Monet had a brief flirtation with caricature, this is true. And he wasn't bad at it. Had he been more interested in human character and not the play of light on a river-bend or field of poppies, he might have become one of those second-tier artists stuck in the long, annihilating shadow of Daumier - who was a pretty good painter in his own right.

Yet seeing Degas in any context is a cause for jubilation. The Phillips Collection has been wisely restrained in its use of him. He appears sparsely in an exhibit that is, in part, dedicated to his work.
The exhibit has a larger context: to connect Degas - and, to a lesser extent, Toulouse-Lautrec - with colleagues across the English Channel: colleagues who have been under-recorded in Impressionist literature, but were lively, even indispensible, cohorts and contributors.

Whistler too is short-shrifted in the exhibit, but his influence is all over, particularly in the work of Sidney Starr, who weighs in with a space-filled, but defiantly tonalist, canvas (Paddington Station, 1886)that shows the great London railroad station at twilight. Have we heard of Sidney Starr here across The Pond? A few of us have, but he's largely a footnote in an era that is largely a clean slate in our conventional art histories - a largely clean slate scrawled with the names of Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Caillebotte, Bazille, and a few others I'm sure art history students are made to learn by heart.

Then there's Sickert - a man who has gained some notoriety lately for being Patricia Cornwell's Jack the Ripper, the original body-scatcher/hit man archetype who preyed, infamously, on Unfortunates who plied their trade in London's East End - a place with much worse things than mush-mouthed taxi-drivers.
Whether this is true or not, Sickert - who had a knack for compartmentalizing himself, to be sure - became a Master of the Underworld in his own way, using as his social lense both the performers and spectators in the music hall of the 1880's and 90's. At this time, public spectacles were seen to by the likes of William Powell Frith, about whose convention-sized painting of Victoria Station Whistler admitted that it had been finished, but never started. Ford Madox Brown was also a popular sermonizer, who depicted England's working-class in an acceptably didactic - yet dazzlingly Three-D - sort of way that still retains its essential documentary function.

Sickert chose the more frighteningly intimate way of showing society both coming apart, and mending itself, at the seams. His spectators are a not-so-gentile mob; his performers are often isolated by a spotlight
- or by the lascivious gazes of a male audience with things other than sweet Irish ditties on its mind.
Sickert did not care for storytelling per se, and yet there's a world of the unspoken - a narrative trail complex and inviting yet as maddeningly elusive as the man himself. Sickert would disappear for a time in rented rooms where he obviously painted - though we can't really know what else went on in them. With or without the possible opprobrium of a crazed double life, Sickert's paintings provide - as well as close off - a proscenium view of a society with secrets and obsessions.

Sickert didn't like naturalism and was not very nice to Stanhope-Forbes, who was dedicated to a narrative style he, Sickert, found impossibly literal-minded.
The word "jejune" comes to mind; perhaps Sickert himself used it. All I would say is that he should have lived to see photo-realism. (I personally disagree with his anti-naturalism bias.)

Sickert's later work lost some of its immediacy and settled for formalist sophistication. The Phillips has hung this phase of his work - which it owns - in two side rooms. Here an aging Sickert is set off with a few good paintings by Edouard Vuillard - a man whose sensibility can be said to chime in very nicely with Sickert's own.

The naturalist school is represented by George Clausen, in a street-scene (A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill, 1881) that appears saccharine at first, but upon a second look, yields a multi-layered formal dimension for which such work is rarely credited. Clausen wasn't as interested in his pretty girl - who comes toward us and is in the sharpest focus - as he was in his street-crew or his plaster-sided buildings - all made with his famous square-brush technique. Clausen may still get a bad rap from the anti-narrationists. Too literal! I don't find it so myself, but I tend to prefer the interpreter to the aesthete: the honest storyteller to the social and formalist butterfly Whistler ultimately became.

There isn't much in the way of quantity in the exhibit, so those of us who don't need a whole catalogue of an particular artist's work will be relieved. The vastly overrated James Tissot's insipid and overdressed young idlers do show up, but the greater vitality of his colleagues shouts him down.
Phillip Wilson Steer is represented by a few paintings, the most fluid of which shows a model in a chair (A Girl at Her Toilet, 1892-93). It could have been painted by John Sloan. Sidney Starr's excellent pastel of a carriage-eye view of a city boulevard is a striking example of the sort of cropping for which Degas is justly famous. There are, in fact, just a handful of Degas paintings - mostly interiors of his beloved dancing studios. Another painting (The Ballet for 'Robert de Diable", 1871) shows the affinity he had with Sickert for live performance. He was able to capture set, peformers, and orchestra with a sublime economy loaded with tantalizing half-lights and painterly smudges.

As this is a sort of informal review, I have no intention of including everyone. (I refer the reader to my "disclaimer" at the beginning of this article.) Most of the artists in this show developed deeply personal ways of reacting to their environment; their work is therefore "of a piece." I am writing here about old friends whom I know well enough to forget in some ways. I don't remember what date we met, or with whom. I don't care what any of us was wearing. But I still find I enjoy listening to what they have to say.
Over time, their message has lost is purity perhaps - even some degree of that urgent context out of which a whole body of action may eventually spring - but the old charm remains and I'm glad to have seen so many of them together again. Given the current disrepute of any sort of realism that is not either in sharp focus, or deals with obsolescent classical notions of reality, it is also a rare privilege to have so many tonalists and naturalists together in one space. Both Tate Britain and the Phillips Collection can be credited with this somewhat minor, but significant, change of venue. Before too long, there will be another spate of Impressionist exhibits that'll make lots of money and keep this particular artistic ghetto in the limelight.

For my money, I prefer to see Clausen's navvies,
Starr's twilight, and Sickert's boorish spectators.


- The exhibit runs through May 14th at the Phillips
Collection: 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009, (202) 387-215.

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.