When the music of the twentieth century fits on a hard drive? And the Kindle makes one paperback into 800?
The collector is forever nostalgic because the collector’s ethos is the consciousness of finitude. The collector wants to give commodities their aesthetic, artistic, sensory value back. Mass capitalism deprives objects from the experience of uniqueness; the collector wants to restore that lost unicity. In a way the collector is a ghost-hunter, forever immersed in the phatasmagoria of his imaginary and of the small shops that, unseen by the masses, are, as it were, only there for the collector.
From Never Neutral.
2 comments:
Wow, thanks for the shout-out, mate. Greetings from Amsterdam. I had never been here. Staying in a lovely B&B called "The Collector"- the owner stores his collections -between junk and antiquities- in the house and rooms. Beautiful second-hand record shops, antiquaries selling all sorts of dated machinery, cool designer studios decorated with early 1984 Apple Macs...
Cheers.
We have much to talk about: the flaneur most of all. I think Bloomsbury is ripe for such things.
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