Colecţionarii

Why people collect art By Erin Thompson

The oil billionaire J Paul Getty was famously miserly. He installed a payphone in his mansion in Surrey, England, to stop visitors from making long-distance calls. He refused to pay ransom for a kidnapped grandson for so long that the frustrated kidnappers sent Getty his grandson’s ear in the mail. Yet he spent millions of dollars on art, and millions more to build the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He called himself ‘an apparently incurable art-collecting addict’, and noted that he had vowed to stop collecting several times, only to suffer ‘massive relapses’. Fearful of airplanes and too busy to take the time to sail to California from his adopted hometown of London, he never even visited the museum his money had filled.

Getty is only one of the many people through history who have gone to great lengths to collect art – searching, spending, and even stealing to satisfy their cravings. But what motivates these collectors?

Debates about why people collect art date back at least to the first century CE. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian claimed that those who professed to admire what he considered to be the primitive works of the painter Polygnotus were motivated by ‘an ostentatious desire to seem persons of superior taste’. Quintilian’s view still finds many supporters.

Arta

Art world is ‘hotbed’ of corruption, collector claims by Hannah Furness

To outsiders, it might appear to be a glamorous hidden world where highbrow art lovers meet some of the richest collectors in the world.

But the art market is actually a „hotbed” of corruption, a leading collector has said.

Kenny Schachter, a curator and commentator, said the art world was steeped in secretive dealings, with money laundering, insider tips and artists being „corrupted” as greed takes over.

Speaking at Hay Festival, sponsored by the Telegraph, Schachter gave an excoriating appraisal of the state of the art market, from the celebrity collectors attracted by money to allegations of immorality at the highest level.

Cu Michelangelo la raze

Scientism in the Arts and Humanities by Roger Scruton

 

This transformation of the humanities into an anti-cultural force seems to be where we are today — or nearly so. Increasingly, we can see attempts to rectify the humanities’ difficulties by assimilating their subject matter to one or another of the sciences.

Take, for instance, art history. Generations of students have been drawn to this subject in the hope of acquiring knowledge of the masterpieces of the past. Art history had developed in nineteenth-century German universities, under the influence of the Swiss historians Jacob Burkhardt, Heinrich Wölfflin, and others, to become a paradigm of objective study in the humanities. The Hegelian theory of the Zeitgeist, put to astute use by Wölfflin, divided everything into neatly circumscribed periods — Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, neoclassical, and so on. And the “comparative” method, in which images were shown side by side and their differences assigned to the distinguishing mental frameworks of their creators, proved endlessly fertile in critical judgments. Look at the works of Wittkower, Panofsky, Gombrich, and the other products of this school of thought, many of whom fled to safety from the Nazi destruction of the German universities, and you will surely conclude that there has never been a more creative and worthwhile addition to the curriculum in modern times.

Yet the scholars are not satisfied. Is there any more “research” to be done on the art of Michelangelo, or the architecture of Palladio? Is there anything to be added to the study of the Gothic cathedral after Ruskin, von Simson, Pevsner, and Sedlmayr? And how do we confront the complaint that this whole subject seems to be focused on a narrow range of dead white European males, who spoke clearly for their times, but who have no great relevance to ours? All in all, the subject of art history has been condemned by its own success to a corner of the academy, there to be starved of funds and graduate students — unless, that is, it can be endowed with some new field of “research.”

 

Singurătatea artistului

 

What Great Artists Need: Solitude by Joe Fassler

He had no discipline in his personal life—I do—but he had extreme discipline when it came to his art and the way he ran his life around it.

For the last 25 years of his life, he was married to the same woman, and the chaos of his life had settled. He lived on a small island called Faro, north of Gotland, where he would plan his films, write the scripts, make the screenboards, and everything. He limited his activities: Besides working and thinking, he might go for a stroll. He would only drink buttered skim milk, and have one cookie in the afternoon—his ailing stomach couldn’t take more than that. In the late afternoon or evening, he would have visitors over to go and look at a movie in his cinema. And that was his routine, every day. He didn’t try to do more.

That’s pretty disciplined to me—living primarily in service to one’s art. But we also hear the other myth: that you must live yourself out.