experience

This page considers the experience of collecting paintings, manuscripts, antiques and other cultural commodities.

It covers -

• introduction
• the collecting impulse
• works and collectors
• corporate art collecting
• institutions

     introduction

Marilynn Karp announced in 2006 that collectors fall into "three precise categories" -

• those who collect goods of intrinsic value (ex: gold, gems), universally coveted substances that have been desirable through the ages
• those who collect commodities of extrinsic value (ex: art, stamps, baseball cards, comic books) with a competing collectorship and limited availability
• those who collect items without intrinsic or extrinsic value (ex: a thread spool, a blue glass shard, an orphaned key), which convey satisfaction and confer serenity upon the collectors who accumulate them.

Motivations or avocations are a bit more blurred than indicated by the "precise" categorisation. It is clear, for example, that some of the most prominent collectors of fine art in accumulating works of extrinsic value were driven by a need to assuage some inner anxiety or emptiness rather than by hardheaded decisions about augmenting capital and engaging in what Thorsten Veblen identified as conspicuous consumption of commodities that have no practical use.

In considering the markets for collectibles highlighted in this note - Botticelli paintings, Safavid carpets, Bugatti cars, Beethoven manuscripts, unique gold coins, Ming ceramics, Warhol screen prints, Gutenberg bibles, Pre-Columbian steles and Confederate battle flags - we might thus be wary about neat generalisations. Some collecting is mechanistic. Other collecting is a form of creativity, drawing on individual discernment and even bravery.

Personal taste interacts with

• supply
• the expectations of peers and the wider community
• legal frameworks (eg the wave of sales by distressed English aristocrats after 1880s legislation facilitated breaking of entailed estates)
• tax regimes
• sectoral, national and international economic circumstances (eg the Japanese property bubble fed purchase of trophy Impressionist paintings, the 1870s agricultural depression across Europe following emergence of the US as the dominant grain producer fed transfer of Old Masters from Germany and France to the US)
• the availability of information and advice regarding individual works, genres and markets.

Some collect because they must or can or because their peers are (or are not) doing so. Others sell for those reasons. Henry James described the Gilded Age as

There was money in the air, ever so much money. … And the money was to be for all the most exquisite things.

A century later we might regret that so much gilded age era loot came from sweated labour and went on tat from Makart, Alma-Tadema, Bougereau and other since-demoted masters.

     the collecting impulse

Major synoptic works on the experience of collecting are surprisingly sparse.

Points of entry into the literature include Collecting: An Unruly Passion - Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1994) by Werner Muensterberger, The Cultures of Collecting (Melbourne: Melbourne Uni Press 1994) edited by John Elsner & Roger Cardinal, To Have & To Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors & Collecting (London: Allen Lane 2002) by Philipp Blom, Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes & the Eternal Passion for Books (New York: Holt 1995), The Strange Life of Objects: 35 Centuries of Art Collecting & Collectors (New York: Atheneum 1961) by Maurice Rheims, Life Like Dolls: The Collector Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them (London: Routledge 2004) by A. F. Robertson, Thatcher Freund's Objects of Desire: The Lives of Antiques and Those Who Pursue Them (New York: Penguin 1995), High Art Down Home: An Economic Ethnography of a Local Art Market (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1998)by Stuart Plattner and The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare & Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 2005) by Judith Pascoe.

Other insights about collecting and consumption are provided in On Collecting (London: Routledge 1999) by Susan Pearce, Collecting in a Consumer Society (London: Routledge 2001) by Russell Belk, Acts of Possession: Collecting in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 2003) edited by Leah Dilworth, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke Uni Press 1993) by Susan Stewart, The Collector's Voice: Contemporary Voices (Aldershot: Ashgate 2003) edited by Susan Pearce, Paul Martin & Alexandra Bounia.

For pre-industrial collecting see Curiosities & Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: Uni of Pennsylvania Press 2001) by Marjorie Swann, Art markets in Europe, 1400-1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate 1999) edited by Michael North & David Ormrod, the provocative Luxury & Legitimation: Royal Collecting In Ancient Mesopotamia (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006) by Allison Thomason, The Nature of Classical Collecting: Collectors and Collections, 100 BCE-100 CE (Aldershot: Ashgate 2004) by Alexandra Bounia, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1996) by Paula Findlen, Colin Bailey, Patriotic Taste. Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2002), Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge 2001) edited by Pamela Smith.

For more recent times see the lucid From Monet To Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market (New York: Random House 1992) by Peter Watson and True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1998) by Anthony Haden-Guest. Closer to home see Annette Van den Bosch's The Australian Art World: Aesthetics in a Global Market (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 2004).

Perspectives are provided in Other Objects of Desire: Collectors and Collecting Queerly (Oxford: Blackwell 2001) edited by Michael Camille & Adrian Rifkin, Great Women Collectors (London: Philip Wilson 1999) by Charlotte Gere & Marina Vaizey, Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850-1950 (London: Tauris 2000) by Stephen Vernoit, The Culture of English Geology, 1815-1851: A Science Revealed Through Its Collecting (Aldershot: Ashgate 2000) by Simon Knell.

     works and collectors

Memoirs include In Flagrante Collecto (New York: Abrams 2006) by Marilynn Karp, Walter Benjamin's 'Unpacking My Library' in Illuminations (New York: Schocken 1968), Roy Neuberger's The Passionate Collector: Eighty Years in the World of Art (New York: Wiley 2002), Alfred Bader's Adventures of a Chemist Collector (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1995) and Peggy Guggenheim's Confessions of an Art Addict (London: Deutsch 1983)

Profiles of collectors include Sigmund Freud & Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities (Binghampton: State Uni of New York 1989) edited by Lynn Gamwell & Richard Wells and The Gods of Freud (New York: Knopf 2006) by Janine Burke, William and Henry Walters, the Reticent Collectors (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1997) by William Johnston, Rudolf II and his World - A Study in Intellectual History 1576–1612 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1973) by Robert Evans, David Cannadine's Mellon: An American Life (New York: Knopf 2006), Jean Strouse's intimate Morgan: American Financier (New York: Random 1999), Suzanne Muchnic's Odd Man In: Norton Simon & the Pursuit of Culture (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1998), Theresa Collins' Otto Kahn: Art, Money, & Modern Time (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 2002) and Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors (New York: Norton 1992) by Rosamond Purcell & Stephen Gould.

     corporate art collecting

Notions of good citizenship and the 'civilised workplace', corporate marketing, institutional one-upmanship or personal aggrandisement have led some commercial and administrative institutions to form corporate collections.

That collecting reflects private collecting by founding families and acquisition or commissioning by guilds and fraternities. Collecting has often been haphazard, restricted and of indifferent quality, centred on portraits of directors and key possessions (eg shipping companies often commissioned paintings of their steamships) or on the personal interest of the chairman - or chairman's partner.

Self-conscious 'corporate collecting' essentially dates from the mid-1960s, with major businesses emulating each other in acquiring contemporary art to decorate their offices and institutions such as universities using that to legitimate an extension of their traditional small-scale acquisition activity. Some inventories are large - Deutsche Bank for example reportedly boasts the largest corporate collection with over 50,000 works, Microsoft has 2,900 works, Pfizer some 5,000 - but typically feature small, inoffensive items such as lithographs of flowers and sailboats rather than major items. Few businesses have had much of a collecting strategy, with works being selected by committees or by consultants (discussed in the following page of this note) and often determined by whether they would frighten the men in suits.

Corporate art collections have largely been a creature of fashion, with business playing follow-the-leader in acquisition (and display) and periodic shifts towards sponsorship of football or other sports rather than collecting lithographs for the 20th floor offices or patronage of the opera or ballet. Some businesses have decided that it is easier to lease works from a body such as Artbank, in the same way that they lease potplants or personal computers.

The half life of most corporate collections is short, whether because the organisation encounters financial difficulties and decides to cash in 'non core' assets, because the enterprise is acquired or dismembered, or because there is strong criticism by the media and shareholders of executive waste and indulgence. In an era of 'right sizing' it is difficult to shed staff while keeping masterpieces on the wall. Items may go onto the market or be donated (with accompanying publicity and tax benefits) to institutions, in a demonstration that "cultural capital" can be cashed in.

High profile deacquisitions have included Vivendi's sale of the Seagram collection, Disney donating its African art collection to the Smithsonian, Sara Lee selling and donating major oils, 7-Eleven and Refco selling their photographic collections, CUB and Shell in Australia selling and donating contemporary painting collections, Fosters selling antiquarian and contemporary works, Enron and BHP and IBM shedding diverse holdings.

Has corporate collecting had a major impact on the market? The answer is unclear. It has clearly fed a range of fine art advisers, dealers, publicists and conservators. Major commissions have received substantial publicity but arguably are not representative of overall corporate spending, much of which is essentially concerned with bric a brac. With the exception of a few outstanding collections - for example the Gilman photographic collection - which mixed bravery, money and a connoisseur's eye the true significance of much corporate art collecting may be that it provided a resting place for works en route to institutional custody.

For corporate collecting see Rosanne Martorella's Corporate Art (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 1990), Chin-tao Wu's Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London: Verso 2002 ), Roland Marchand's Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2000), Sanford Jacoby's Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since The New Deal (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1997), Whitney Prendergast's thin 2003 Corporate Art Collecting dissertation, Julie Beth Korman's 1985 Corporate Art Collecting in Canada dissertation and Caroline Made's Contemporary Patronage: Corporate Art Investment dissertation (PDF).

     institutions

Status, tax regimes and personal mortality have tended to funnel fine arts and other entities from private collections into the hands of institutions.

There is more detailed discussion of art museums and other curatorial institutions later in this note

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