Not unlike the progression that collecting takes as your taste and judgment become more refined — which might be good for discerning vintage wines, but not so great if the actions you take become calculated or less altruistic — this can occur when the intent, focus and challenge is how to get noticed or simply, collected.
Who are we collecting – our peers? After all, collecting always involves the choice of one thing at the expense of another, whether it involves friendships, trophies, artists, or the art that they make. An artist can collect galleries, exhibits, and collectors just as readily, but at what cost to their careers?
In the world of art there are always prizes to win, fortunes to make, and glory just around the very next corner, but there remains one piece — la pièce de résistance — which often remains very elusive. It is a reward so great that our feeble attempts of support and recognition of each other pales largely before it - namely, the understanding, empathy, and appreciation of the general public.
The desire to show off one’s collection, although powerful and evident, may just as easily become a numbers game between the haves and the have-nots. It can be expected of the collectors to collect art, artists to make it, galleries to show it, and museums to archive it, but since these individuals and institutions here are fairly numbered and perhaps overly few, an over reliance on them and other sparse resources at this developmental point in time is hardly conducive to healthy growth.
That’s where Collecting Dust and Other Things comes in. The individual participants expressed a panoramic range of personal and professional experiences with concrete examples of their successes, as well as their frustrations — in real time — freely offering their insight and inclinations regarding the arts in San Diego. They were under no obligation to make changes or offer solutions to actual problems, real or imagined.
Hopefully free from posturing or presumption, I therefore offer a couple of proposals for change which continue to build on dialogue in an attempt to collect more than dust, or at least keep it off the shelf of abandoned desires.
First, decide once and for all that the world of art is going to remain an inclusive machine of production, marketing, and sales in which you need the production of art in order to generate sales through either controlling the quality and critically viable interest in that output, ultimately derived from the artist’s hands, or accepting that there very likely is a limited amount of spending which could be labeled as collecting.
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