On collecting (Kimmelman)

It is taken for granted that Rembrandts are worth collect-

ing because they are art and expensive, but collectors, as Dr.

Hicks proves, will collect pretty much everything, without

necessarily thinking that what they collect has aesthetic or

monetary value. Prestige, like taste in art is often in the eye

of the‘ collector, and true value may be greatest when the

value is only symbolic. Collected objects become symbolic

when they lose their utilitarian purpose. A former prisoner in

a Stalinist labor camp, for example, collected keys to locks

that were no longer in use. A key is no longer just a key if it

belonged to the Bastille, nor a sewing kit just a sewing kit if

Betsy Ross sewed with it. As Philipp Blom, a writer on col-

lecting, has put it: “As often as not the objects collected are

the cast-offs of society, overtaken by technological advance,

used and disposable, outmoded, disregarded, unfashion-

able.” Their uselessness becomes their asset: they turn into

totems and fragments of the lost worlds they came from. So

the arm of Teresa of Avila is prized not because it is practical

to medical science as a specimen of muscle and bone but be-

cause it is connected, as Blom says, “with otherworldliness,

as a key to heaven, to a world infinitely richer than our

everyday existence.” It becomes a holy relic.

just as art promises wonderment——an access to a realm

beyond the everyday, through the experience of which we

may understand the everyday better—-—a collection of things,

even everyday things, promises wonderment, too, as these

things become no longer everyday, having been enshrined by

a collector. Walter Benjamin, who collected books, said that

“one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment

when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a

thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely

and abandoned on the marketplace and bought it to give it its

freedom—-the way the prince bought a beautiful slave girl in

‘The Arabian Nights.’ ” He added, “To a book collector, you

see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his

shelves.”

For Benjamin, collecting makes sense of a senseless

world. Collectors take up “arms against dispersal. The great

collector is touched to the core by the confusion and the dis-

persal in which things are found in this world.” 

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Connoisseurship entails making distinctions through slow,

comparative observation, whether it involves paintings or

wooden ducks.

Partly it was a desire for a more methodical approach to

collected objects a system for spreading connoisseurship,

that ushered in a new age of museums two centuries ago.

Museums began to specialize. Elks’ hooves went one way,

paintings another. The balance tipped from delight toward

instruction. The new museums set out more systematically

to categorize things, to create order, or at least to imply that

there is an order to life. René Descartes, who called wonder-

ment the first of all the passions, also wrote that an excess

of wonder can “pervert the use of reason.” The age of won-

der cabinets turned into the age of Descartes and the ency-

clopedists.

But the spirit of the wonder cabinets never altogether

died. Art museums, and even modern collections of light-

bulbs, though they may not be true wonder cabinets, preserve

what’s marvelous to show us what is rare and what we can’t

see otherwise, and thereby help us see, with heightened

curiosity, what is around us.