Collecting:- opinions sought

[guwaya]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

"... that the majority of collectors in any field are primarily that:- collectors. They have little interest in the objects that they collect apart from the physical being of the objects."

Thank you.

A statement which reflects my own opinion, the question is just 'why is this so?' and 'what does collecting mean for the person or what is the intention of collecting?' (But these questions can be hired first).

In my opinion there are two ways of collecting:

1) Collecting special objects or a group of objects (e.g. edged weapons in general) with the aim to acquire as much different objects as possible. The interests of this group of collectors are more the aspects of the technical work and quality of craftmanship and possibly also an aesthetic point of view, etc.. Some superficial cultural background information are a positive side effect but rather of miner interest for this group of collectors.

2) Collecting grew out of an interest in a culture and was more present in former times I suppose. This assertion is among others to recognize in the partially short essays appeared in scientific periodicals. The authors were mostly persons who lived for a longer while in a foreign culture and over the time certain objects aroused their interest with the result, that they entered deeper in the significance of the object for the culture. They learned, that material culture represents the different cultural aspects of the group and that they could 'read' a lot out of the item. Those people possibly started to collect special objects but within a reasonable quantum.

For me the collecting of ethnographic art is inevitably connected with an interest in the culture it comes from - it is the materialized image of this culture.

Unfortunately the "background to those objects seems to be something that is not of very much interest, and hence receives much less attention than the objects." (A. G. Maisey). This trend seems to continue immensly fast - a result of our quickly changing times?

Regards,
guwaya