Out of friendship, admiration, inspiration, and jealousy, many creators are great collectors.. Matisse, Degas, Rodin, Monet, Van Gogh, Reynolds, Van Dyck, Picasso, Leighton, Watts, Lawrence. They are artists with one point in common: they collect art. Professional deformation? More than that. The pieces they treasure reveal their searches, questions and aesthetic influences; curiosity, admiration and jealousy for other colleagues; the vanguards that disturb them; the portraits of each era; its dreamed paradises and experiences; and his concept of art.. Sometimes they exchange some works for others, they also pay favors and debts with them. They acquire them to help a friend or simply because they admire the author and want them. They are doubly valuable jewels: by who buys them and who creates them.. «I am selfish, my collection is only for me and a few friends. I keep it in my room, around my bed. Claude Monet (1840-1926) told the writer Marcel Tendron in 1924. “For a long time I had to content myself with seeing those paintings in passing, because I couldn’t buy them,” he confesses. . He starts it with gifts from other artists and reinforces it with exchanges. When he succeeds and has money, “he buys paintings by those who have the same pictorial concerns, even if they find solutions different from his own,” explains curator...
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I can’t help it: every time I read that a whale has been found stranded on a beach near Barcelona, I remember the collection of phalluses of the famous Icelandic professor Sigurdur Hjartarson. I know it may sound strange, but readers will understand me if I explain that it was there that I first saw (and I suspect last) a huge sperm whale penis weighing 75 kilos and six feet long. In short, what we could call a penis chunk.. The truth is that, at least as far as I know, collecting phalluses is rarely a very common occupation. The dominant trend in collecting is rather limited to stamps, stickers, coins, butterflies, beetles and other objects or beings free of all suspicion. The accumulation of phalluses in a systematic way does not seem to be very common. . That is why when I came across Hjartarson, a 61-year-old honorable history teacher, in Iceland, and he told me what his collection consisted of, my eyes widened. ‘I started collecting phalluses in 1974,’ he explained seriously, ‘and four years ago I opened a museum in Reykjavik to show them to the public. Every year I have more than 5,000 visitors. ‘. The museum opened by Hjartarson, located in the very center of Reykjavik, is called the Icelandic Falological Institute, which sounds very...
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“What else is a collection more than a mess that habit has accommodated to the point of making it look orderly?”. Walter Benjamin.. According to the Royal Spanish Academy, a collection is “an ordered set of things, usually of the same kind and brought together for their special interest or value.” But what is it that determines what can become of “interest” or “value” for an individual?. The following collections show that there are no borders when placing the drive in an object. The fascination when it comes to collecting can go through unexpected places. “Do not disturb”. The Swiss Jean-François Vernetti seems to be a lover of good sleep. He has collected 11,111 different samples of the “do not disturb” sign from hotels in 189 countries around the world. His quest to get the most of these signs began in 1985 when he found one of them that was misspelled. In 2012 it entered the Guinness Book of Records. The challenge would be to calculate Vernetti’s spending on hotels and airline tickets.. The center of the world. Graham Barker does not suffer from an ego complex, but from a disgusting fixation on the fluff that collects in his belly button. This 51-year-old Australian man has spent more than half his life – 32 years – with this creepy compilation...
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