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Owning and Having |
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The old adage goes that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Something like this applies to art: You can have art but you can’t own it. But how can this be?, asks the bewildered collector who just spent a fortune on a painting. Well yes, you can own the object but possession begins and ends there and only a fool would think they could get it all. |
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Perhaps this is abundantly obvious to those of us who make art. If a fire consumed my studio and subsequently all my paintings, the magnitude of this tragedy would be devastating. Yet, although it might not seem like it for a long time, I would not have lost everything. Art is both corporeal and ethereal where you can survive without the former but not without the latter. I could never replicate exactly the work I lost but so what? The paintings that would follow would inevitably grow out the work that was lost. At the very least a relationship and bond would be established between the two as sealed in my mind and memory. The options are that one could continue to mourn the loss or to try to create a Phoenix from the ashes; but realistically, both would apply. |
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Pity the schmuck collector then, the one who takes pride in spending a pile on a great work of art only to hide it away in an exclusive private compilation. This work is only seen by a limited few and the purpose for this kind of collecting is to inflate the prestige and stroke the ego of the collector. Such an individual has a treasure but fails to realize its true worth. Simply put, exclusivity is the purpose of this base desire. I |
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