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THAT VERY THING
WHEN ONE IS NEVER ENOUGH
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BY JAIME WOLF
In an old Chinese tale, a connoisseur of gold goes one morning to market,
makes a beeline for the dealers' stalls, grabs some gold, and bolts. The market guards chase and
apprehend him, asking how in the world he could possibly have expected to get away with the theft in
front of so many witnesses. “When I took it, I didn't see any people,” the man answers.
“I just saw the gold.”
The moment in which the accumulation of a particular kind of cool or interesting
or beautiful thing becomes a collection is the moment when it stops being simply itself and becomes
instead a vehicle for powerful, sometimes irrational impulses. The most visible among those impulses
is a compulsion for exhaustiveness, a dizzying desire for completeness. Museums and scholars may ultimately
reap the benefit of the
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PENGUINS, Belgium
1995, Alfred David takes stock of his penguin collection.
Photo by Thierry Vallier / Gamma Press
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collector's relentless need for comprehensive acquisition — but the furtherance
of knowledge is rarely the motivating factor.
A friend who was married for a time to a rare-book dealer once told me her husband's clients invariably collected titles by the writers who they wished they could be, “if they had talent instead of money.”
Another friend in the music business likes to claim that power pop is a byproduct of songwriters who are also record collectors. In power-pop songs, he says, every girl's name is really a stand-in for a Beatles record, and every invocation of unconsummated love is born of the frustration that the hole in the center of their LPs is too small to fuck while the hole in the middle of their 45s is too big.
It's hardly an accident, I think, that people who make a point of seeking out a variety of sexual partners are called “collectors.”
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BICYCLES, Qatar
2003, Sheikh Saoud shows off his bicycle collection.
Photo by Xavier Rossi/Gamma Press
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TOY CARS, Switzerland
2001 toy car collector in his workshop.
Photo by Andreas Teichmann/ Laif
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PIGGY BANKS, Germany
2003, Karlheinz Klimt stands
behind ceramic piggy banks, part of
a 700-piece collection of vintage savings boxes.
Photo by Waltaud Grubitzsch/Landov
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