Did You Choose the Object, or Did the Object Choose You?
Every collector eventually tells the same story, although they rarely notice how peculiar it sounds. They speak about a chair discovered in a forgotten antique shop outside Florence, a painting encountered in a provincial auction in Yorkshire, a carved figure found beneath a table at a Sunday market in Johannesburg, or a cracked ceramic bowl sitting almost anonymously on a shelf in Kyoto. The details change, but the language remains remarkably consistent. "I couldn't stop thinking about it." "I left, but I had to go back." "It stayed with me." We accept these expressions as harmless metaphors because they fit comfortably within the romantic mythology of collecting. Yet they deserve to be taken more seriously than that. What if the language collectors instinctively use reveals something fundamental about aesthetic experience that modern philosophy has largely forgotten? We almost always describe collecting as an act of choice. A buyer evaluates, compare...
