Objects of Desire
Objects of Desire: The Lives of Antiques and Those Who Pursue Them by Thatcher Freund is a peculiar book, but I like it. I’ve been using it to casually take a break as I weed through the heavy stuff (though I’m reading it for a class as well). Reading a chapter or two in between things, a familiar pattern emerges.
It starts with a localized, narrative description of a particular antique auction. Then it digresses into the history of the collector or figure, and then it digresses into the history of the piece. History is fun when it is presented in this way. You get the place, then the person, then the thing. However, I had to pause just for a second to record a curious bit of information about the then 22 year-old head of Sotheby’s Americana division’s first experience at auction:
What Stahl remembered most, however, was that soon after the auction began, a dealer from Philadelphia suffered a heart attack and died on the spot. “The individual was taken away and the sale went right on,” Stahl recalled many years later. “And I said to myself, ‘This is for me.’”
On one level, the reaction is horrific. However, on a deeper level it shows how much we guide ourselves through desire. When a desire is so intense that even death doesn’t interrupt it for long, it enters into the territory of the perverse.
In an interesting way, the book plays on the will to know. These people are intensely involved with knowing everything about the pieces they collect. I sometimes watch Antiques Road Show on PBS, and think to myself that they are all closet scholars, these people who collect and investigate remnants of human junk.
The will to know seems to be the strongest desire of all.
Perhaps the desire to desire is even stronger than the desire to know? The mark of ‘the collector’ rather than the simple purchaser seems to be fetishizing, after all–the thrill of the hunt, the primacy of the object and its cocoon of meaning. Abstract History rather than specific history. In that sense, no real collector ever really wants to know everything about a piece because that would diminish the thrill of discovery. The possibility of creating/uncovering a mystery is what seems to keep antiquers–real antiquers, collectors, not dabblers–coming back and back and back to the auctions. And it’s so often their downfall, as they get suckered by a dubious piece with an intriquing, fabricated history.
You have a good point, Steve.
However, thinking about it in Foucaultian terms one could also say that built into the desire to know is a fear of knowledge which frustrates any attempt at comprehension. Looking at the desire to desire in these terms brings up an interesting counterpoint.
The fear of desire imposes a swing towards asceticism.
Interesting. So in a sense, I suppose, collecting can be read as surrounding oneself with the unknowable and the unpossessable–empty vessels (literally and figuratively) into which a collector can pour the meanings he or she most wants to believe.