phreatobite
Jedi Master
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2009
- Messages
- 599
From the Telegraph... I think many of us would consider ourselves in the third age!
The First Age - Childhood and Early Adolescence: Wanting it all
The Second Age - Late adolescence and early adulthood: Getting Shot of It All
The Third Age - Early Middle Age: Buying It All Back Again
You've found your life partner, you've got your property, you want to fill it with things that tell the world who you are. The thought that you cheerfully allowed your Beano comics/World Cup coins/original Zeppelin vinyl to be given to jumble sales makes you wake in cold sweats. You can barely remember the bands you liked in your twenties; it's the albums you loved when you were 17 that count, which you rebuy in endless different formats and remastered editions. If you're a real collector you'll have two original vinyl copies of every key album: one to listen to, one to preserve for all time.
Now you have the opportunity to explore your tastes and passions by building your own library, your own cabinet of curiosities. Yet gradually the sense of exploration gives way to the anxiety about completion that is at the root of all collecting.
Whether you're a child collecting comics or a multimillionaire buying art the process is the same: you become embroiled in a relationship with your collection in which "plugging the gaps" becomes your principal preoccupation — be it a rare Spiderman comic or a painting by one of the key masters in your chosen period. And every collector has a ghost collection of things they didn't have the money, nerve or presence of mind to buy — which often exist for them with greater intensity than the things they do have.
Because collecting is often more about the idea of the thing than the thing itself. Or it certainly is if you're a man. While there are plenty of women who will go head-to-head with men in terms of anally retentive acquisition, women's collecting tends to be more sensual than men's, involving things you might actually enjoy having around you: ceramics, textiles or as in the case of one woman of my acquaintance, animal skulls and Russian folk costumes.
Yet even women get bogged down in questions of rarity and condition, which overwhelm the simple pleasure of engaging with the object itself.
The Fourth Age - Late Middle Age and Old Age. Getting Shot of It All (Again)
The First Age - Childhood and Early Adolescence: Wanting it all
The Second Age - Late adolescence and early adulthood: Getting Shot of It All
The Third Age - Early Middle Age: Buying It All Back Again
You've found your life partner, you've got your property, you want to fill it with things that tell the world who you are. The thought that you cheerfully allowed your Beano comics/World Cup coins/original Zeppelin vinyl to be given to jumble sales makes you wake in cold sweats. You can barely remember the bands you liked in your twenties; it's the albums you loved when you were 17 that count, which you rebuy in endless different formats and remastered editions. If you're a real collector you'll have two original vinyl copies of every key album: one to listen to, one to preserve for all time.
Now you have the opportunity to explore your tastes and passions by building your own library, your own cabinet of curiosities. Yet gradually the sense of exploration gives way to the anxiety about completion that is at the root of all collecting.
Whether you're a child collecting comics or a multimillionaire buying art the process is the same: you become embroiled in a relationship with your collection in which "plugging the gaps" becomes your principal preoccupation — be it a rare Spiderman comic or a painting by one of the key masters in your chosen period. And every collector has a ghost collection of things they didn't have the money, nerve or presence of mind to buy — which often exist for them with greater intensity than the things they do have.
Because collecting is often more about the idea of the thing than the thing itself. Or it certainly is if you're a man. While there are plenty of women who will go head-to-head with men in terms of anally retentive acquisition, women's collecting tends to be more sensual than men's, involving things you might actually enjoy having around you: ceramics, textiles or as in the case of one woman of my acquaintance, animal skulls and Russian folk costumes.
Yet even women get bogged down in questions of rarity and condition, which overwhelm the simple pleasure of engaging with the object itself.
The Fourth Age - Late Middle Age and Old Age. Getting Shot of It All (Again)
