Nowadays people enjoy spending their leisure time at art galleries or museums as much as playing sports. The more knowledge you have about art or the more collections of artworks in your possession seem to represent your wealth. If you have something that is attractive, you want to let others to know about it, perhaps that is one of the intrinsic nature of humans, just like how mothers want to show off their child how good she/he is at doing something and better than any other children. “Whether a child collects model dinosaurs or dolls…on single objects is negatively marked as fetishism” (Clifford, 219). Perhaps this is the same kind, by the process of presenting the toy on the shelf, the private becomes public and the individuality of the object becomes collective but in taxonomy. Also there is the system of exchange between spectators of knowledge being shared and it raises the political influence to others as well. When someone decides to collect an object/s or any thing in their own possession, it is because they are formerly attracted by its aesthetics just like the view of Clive Bell how he claimed “an aesthetic response is intuitive and involuntary” (Pooke and Newall, 12). But because the toy then gets explained upon the reasons why it is being collected, it becomes contemporary in the way that “anything is permissible in the contemporary art world so long as it is pedigreed, substantiated, referentialized” (Kraus, 147). This act of displaying and said about the work is a process of the private becoming public just like the relationship between the original work and the reproductions of the original. By the way that the original work is kept to oneself, gets displayed then viewed by people then it gets globalised. In the end the work loses its originality and its speciality in the fact that there are so many people reproducing the work. Then what is the special thing about the work if everyone has a copy of it and they have viewed it? The huge price difference between the original and the reproduction, perhaps this is what distinguishes people to perceive someone who own the original are financially abundant. The price of an artwork, a way to earn for living, maybe that is why the artists nowadays aim for not as well as “artist’s artist” but also the “recognition” of the artists (Graw, 82). However there is an advantage of a work getting globalised rapidly with the superb quality of the photographs, it leaves not much of a difference between most of the original works and the mimesis. How then is it different and how is it special if I owned an original work myself? Is it just the fact that the work is done by the actual artist? Or that it is shockingly expensive? “Money cannot buy you happiness but it seems money can buy you art” (3News). This shows a strong linkage and the relation between art and market. This also sums up my point about my view on economic situation where art is no longer possessed for appreciation but almost is for an evidence of someone’s financial reputation.
James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp.215-251.
Chris Kraus Bad Nostalgia, Cast Away, Video Green: Lost Angeles Art and The Triumph of Nothingness, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, pp.111-114 & 145-150
Grant Pooke and Diana Newall, “Art Theories and Art Histories”, The Basics: Art History, Routledge 2008, New York, pp.4-15.
Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market an Celebrity Culture, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009, pp.81-94 & 112-116.
Laura Frykberg, “Art Dealers Turns Misfortune into Opportunity”, 3News, 03 May 2011
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