Or: The security of „No, Thanks.“

This is really absurd (and doesn’t contain any pictures). I have been occupying my time with art since a mere eight weeks. And when I see an artwork now I can already tell if it is something I don’t want.

This is the easier part. Not wanting things and knowing why. Some may be more decorative than mindboggling. Some might be an idea I can appreciate but that still doesn’t inspire me. Take Banksy for example. His stuff looks great and his way of working certainly is part of his art. Still, I don’t need to have any of this stuff or prints of it. For me, it’s enough to see what he is doing and how that influences the art world and the rest of the world.

Some communities in the UK even let the population decide what street art to remove and what to keep and preserve, so I hear. This is certainly a stunning development, fueled by artists like Banksy. Does it make me want to live with his stuff? No.

Knowing what I don’t want gives me a sense of security. Even if it’s a superficial or even false one.

Wanting things is much, much harder! Wanting things and knowing why is really tough. Why is that? Because then I start thinking about whether I could afford it. Should the artwork be available at all.

Rudolf Reiber’s “Dark Matter” for example is so easy for me to want. It fits in with my tiny collection, it follows the same line, it continues to amaze me. But it’s hard for me to get. (Maybe I should try and talk Rik Reinking into selling it to me. Next week I’ll have a look at another work by Reiber that I’m almost equally interested in. We’ll see if that one becomes unavailable due to budget or not.)

So, knowing what I want mostly gives me a sense of incompleteness and loss.

While it’s exciting to find things, the artworks I can’t have continue to echo in my brain. …How can I explain the feeling? Let’s try it this way: The art world is a universe running parallel to mine. I can look into it, but I can’t pull much of it into my universe.

Which, of course, is what got me hooked, what keeps me going.
And I have made plans, also, to get more art …

Or: A stamp is not a movie theatre

I will only do this on rare occasions, I promise. But this time I think you’ll benefit from it: a post about what’s happening over at Independent Collectors. While our programmers fiddle with bugs (inside the computer, their kitchen is clean, I’ve seen it), we also create random video clips.

This time it’s me and in case you haven’t seen it yet (or were bothered by the tiny size), here is the big picture. They asked me to explain Independent Collectors as fast as possible. It took me 20 minutes to speak and our film maker (who joined me in Paris) a weekend to boil it down to 87 seconds. Fasten seatbelts, no time for popcorn:

Questions? And the next post is about art again. I swear.

Or: Collecting knowledge

When I started this project at the beginning of June, I didn’t expect the development to feel so fast. I bet it’s not really fast. But it sure feels like high speed (read the first post here).

What I did in the very beginning is that I wrote down all the artists names I could think of as well as all the artwork titles. I came to 8 artists and 3 artworks (read that post here). Today, the list is too long to post here. 25 artists and 14 artworks. I thought about making a bar chart of that increasement in excel, but I figured I wait for more data …

It may not sound much to you as an expert collector, but I started late. I’m over 30. Brain’s a little muddled and time is scarce. Still: It’s an increase of roughly 350% on both accounts together, right? Correct me if I’m wrong. That means approx. 50% increase per week. If I continue like that for 20 years …

I’m afraid it’s a bit like learning to play the guitar. The first three chords sure come easy and the Intro to Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” sure feels like success, but then it gets tough. I don’t want to be stuck with “Louie Louie” when it comes to collecting art.

And I meant this post to be just a short one to cover the time until I find the time to write about what’s really getting to me at the moment: How do you photograph your art? Now that I have some, it wants to be pictured …