While there are collections that are useful to the public that exist long after the original collector has passed, the personal collections and the relationship to the collector create meaning beyond the physical objects.īenjamin notes that collecting is an intensely personal business. Benjamin states: “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner” (67). Collections are most powerful when they are intimately tied to the owner.In many ways, collecting is about possessing something other people do not. In the case of auctions, bidders who are hoping to collect must also take into account the responses of their counterparts. Additionally, creating a collection plays on humankind’s competitive nature.Collections have some level of sacredness, in that they are set apart from the profane and daily. In the example of books, most of the books on a collector’s shelf are unread and the books that are read are more likely to be given away. Collections are not things that are useful everyday.Even within large book collections, the fringes are made up of albums, non-bound books, and other things that could be construed as meaningless to anyone other than the owner. Collections are rarely begun without some attachment to the object, some memory tied to the physical thing. Benjamin, as a writer collecting books, finds that the act of collecting “borders on the chaos of memories” (59).
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