A constellation of enterprising ideas about art and artifact collections.
In summary, a prominent collector’s house caught on fire which damaged several ultra-high value pieces. Insurers claim that this specific group works did not suffer any damage after already paying out $141,000,000 in fire-related damages. Insurers further claim that damages in those works predate the 2018 fire. Check the condition report.
This week, pop artist Lizzo received a lot of attention for playing a 200-year-old crystal flute once owned by James Madison. The Library of Congress offered Lizzo the chance to play the flute when she arrived in Washington, D.C. for her performance. Classically trained Lizzo toured the collection prior to performing and later played the flute on stage to make history as the “first person to ever play the flute”. A team from the Library of Congress escorted the flute to the venue and directly into the pro’s deft hands on stage. It was historic, and it was fun.
These anecdotes contain all of the elements outlined by Campbell and places these artists as the heroes. They have created a mythology around them and/or their works. For them, though, there is no (or little) pretense. This is them (magnified through the retelling of the stories) and it exemplifies their values. Companies and organized institutions, take note.
The idea of questioning the purpose of caring for collections and thus the jobs of registrars, conservators, shippers, insurers, attorneys, curators, administrators, archivists educators, and more stems from the furor from my colleagues surrounding the multiple incidents of climate activists gluing themselves to works of art. Naturally, when your job requires you to take a symbolic bullet for your collection, a nauseating incident like this fans angry flames.
As I mentioned, a quick reminder that “NFT” does NOT solely equal a piece of digital art. It is a technology that provides scarcity to a digital asset. Scarcity delivers value – whether gold or non-tangible goods. Therefore, it makes many other activities possible beyond digital art possible such as music and events/ticketing. Through their increased application for these purposes will seem into the greater water supply of society and in 10 years we will not understand anything else. I want to speculate on this as it relates to art and artifact collections.
