Tag Archives: collecting

Music

A Vinyl-head’s Dream

vinyl-LPs

If you’ve ever owned vinyl — the circular, black, 12 inch kind — you will know that there are certain pleasures associated with it. The different quality of sound from the spiraling grooves; the (usually) gorgeous album cover art; the printed lyrics and liner notes, sometimes an included wall poster.

Cassette tapes and then CDs shrank these pleasures. Then came the death knell, tolled by MP3 (or MPEG3) and MP4 and finally streaming.

Fortunately some of us have managed to hold on to our precious vinyl collections: our classic LPs and rare 12-inch singles; though not so much the 45s. And, to some extent vinyl is having a small — but probably temporary — renaissance.

So, I must must admit to awe and a little envy over Zero Freitas’ collection. Over the years he has amassed a vast collection of over 6 million records. During his 40 plus years of collecting he’s evolved from a mere vinyl junkie to a global curator and preservationist.

From the Vinyl Factory:

Nearly everyone interested in records will have, at some point heard, the news that there is a Brazilian who owns millions of records. Fewer seem to know, however, that Zero Freitas, a São Paulo-based businessman now in his sixties, plans to turn his collection into a public archive of the world’s music, with special focus on the Americas. Having amassed over six million records, he manages a collection similar to the entire Discogs database. Given the magnitude of this enterprise, Freitas deals with serious logistical challenges and, above all, time constraints. But he strongly believes it is worth his while. After all, no less than a vinyl library of global proportions is at stake.

How to become a part of this man’s busy timetable – that was the question that remained unanswered almost until the very end of my stay in São Paulo in April 2015. It was 8 am on my second last morning in the city, when Viviane Riegel, my Brazilian partner in crime, received a terse message: ‘if you can make it by 10am to his warehouse, he’ll have an hour for you’. That was our chance. We instantly took a taxi from the city’s south-west part called Campo Belo to a more westerly neighbourhood of Vila Leopoldina. We were privileged enough to listen to Freitas’ stories for what felt like a very quick hundred minutes. His attitude and life’s work provoked compelling questions.

The analogue record in the digital age
What makes any vinyl collection truly valuable? How to tell a mere hoarder from a serious collector? And why is vinyl collectable now, at a time of intensive digitalization of life and culture?

Publically pronounced dead by the mainstream industry in the 1990s, vinyl never really ceased to live and has proved much more resilient than the corporate prophets of digital ‘progress’ would like us to believe. Apart from its unique physical properties, vinyl records contain a history that’s longer than any digital medium can ever hope to replicate. Zero Freitas insists that this history has not been fully told yet. Indeed, when acquired and classified with a set of principles in mind, records may literally offer a record of culture, for they preserve not just sounds, but also artistic expression, visual sensibility, poetry, fashion, ideas of genre differentiation and packaging design, and sometimes social commentary of a given time and place. If you go through your life with records, then your collection might be a record of your life. Big record collections are private libraries of cultural import and aesthetic appeal. They are not so very different from books, a medium we still hold in high regard. Books and records invite ritualistic experience, their digital counterparts offer routine convenience.

The problem is that many records are becoming increasingly rare. As Portuguese musicologist Rui Vieria Nery writes reflecting on the European case of Fado music, “the truth is that, strange as it may seem, collections of Fado recordings as recent as the ’50s to ’70s are difficult to get hold of.“ Zero Freitas emphasizes that the situation of collections from other parts of the world may be even worse.

We have to ask then, what we lose if we don’t get hold of them? For one thing, records preserve the past. They save something intangible from oblivion, where a tune or a cover can suddenly transport us back in time to a younger version of ourselves and the feelings we once had. Rare and independently released records can provide a chance for genuine discovery and learning. They help acquire new tastes, delve into different under-represented stories.

What Thomas Carlyle once wrote about books applies to vinyl perhaps with even greater force: ‘in books lies the soul of the whole past time, the articulate audible voice of the past when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream’. This quote is inscribed in stone on the wall of the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Having listened to Zero Freitas, this motto could just as easily apply to his vinyl library project. Focusing on rare Brazilian music, he wants to save some endangered species of vinyl, and thus to raise awareness of world’s vast but jeopardised musical ecologies. This task seems urgent now as our attention span gets ever shorter and more distracted, as reflected in the uprooted samples and truncated snippets of music scattered all over the internet.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Vinyl LPs. Courtesy of the author.

Art

Why Collect Art?

google-search-art-collector

Art collectors have probably been around since humans first started scribbling, painting, casting and throwing (clay). Some collect exclusively for financial gain or to reduce their tax bills. Others accumulate works to signal their worth and superiority over their neighbors or to the world. Still others do so because of a personal affinity to the artist. A small number use art to launder money. Some even collect art because of emotional attachment to the art itself.

A new book entitled Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors by Erin Thompson, delves into the art world and examines the curious mind of the art collector. Thompson is assistant professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. Parts of her recent essay for Aeon are excerpted below.

From Aeon:

The oil billionaire J Paul Getty was famously miserly. He installed a payphone in his mansion in Surrey, England, to stop visitors from making long-distance calls. He refused to pay ransom for a kidnapped grandson for so long that the frustrated kidnappers sent Getty his grandson’s ear in the mail. Yet he spent millions of dollars on art, and millions more to build the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He called himself ‘an apparently incurable art-collecting addict’, and noted that he had vowed to stop collecting several times, only to suffer ‘massive relapses’. Fearful of airplanes and too busy to take the time to sail to California from his adopted hometown of London, he never even visited the museum his money had filled.

Getty is only one of the many people through history who have gone to great lengths to collect art – searching, spending, and even stealing to satisfy their cravings. But what motivates these collectors?

Debates about why people collect art date back at least to the first century CE. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian claimed that those who professed to admire what he considered to be the primitive works of the painter Polygnotus were motivated by ‘an ostentatious desire to seem persons of superior taste’. Quintilian’s view still finds many supporters.

Another popular explanation for collecting – financial gain – cannot explain why collectors go to such lengths. Of course, many people buy art for financial reasons. You can resell works, sometimes reaping enormous profit. You can get large tax deductions for donating art to museums – so large that the federal government has seized thousands of looted antiquities that were smuggled into the United States just so that they could be donated with inflated valuations to knock money off the donors’ tax bills. Meanwhile, some collectors have figured out how to keep their artworks close at hand while still getting a tax deduction by donating them to private museums that they’ve set up on their own properties. More nefariously, some ‘collectors’ buy art as a form of money laundering, since it is far easier to move art than cash between countries without scrutiny.

But most collectors have little regard for profit. For them, art is important for other reasons. The best way to understand the underlying drive of art collecting is as a means to create and strengthen social bonds, and as a way for collectors to communicate information about themselves and the world within these new networks. Think about when you were a child, making friends with the new kid on the block by showing off your shoebox full of bird feathers or baseball cards. You were forming a new link in your social network and communicating some key pieces of information about yourself (I’m a fan of orioles/the Orioles). The art collector conducting dinner party guests through her private art gallery has the same goals – telling new friends about herself.

People tend to imagine collectors as highly competitive, but that can prove wrong too. Serious art collectors often talk about the importance not of competition but of the social networks and bonds with family, friends, scholars, visitors and fellow collectors created and strengthened by their collecting. The way in which collectors describe their first purchases often reveals the central role of the social element. Only very rarely do collectors attribute their collecting to a solo encounter with an artwork, or curiosity about the past, or the reading of a textual source. Instead, they almost uniformly give credit to a friend or family member for sparking their interest, usually through encountering and discussing a specific artwork together. A collector showing off her latest finds to her children is doing the same thing as a sports fan gathering the kids to watch the game: reinforcing family bonds through a shared interest.

Read the entire article below.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

Idea Soup

Mr. Magorium’s Real Life Toy Emporium

tim-rowett

We are all children at heart. Unfortunately many of us are taught to suppress or abandon our dreams and creativity as a prerequisite for entering adulthood. However, a few manage to keep the wonder of their inner child alive.

Tim Rowett is one such person; through his toys he brings smiles and re-awakens memories in many of us who have since forgotten how to play and imagine. Though, I would take issue with Wired’s characterization of Mr.Rowett as an “eccentric”. Eccentricity is not a label that I’d apply to a person who remains true to his or her earlier self.

From Wired (UK):

When Wired.co.uk visited Tim Rowett’s flat in Twickenham, nothing had quite prepared us for the cabinet of curiosities we found ourselves walking into. Old suitcases overflowing with toys and knick-knacks were meticulously labelled, dated and stacked on top of one another from room to room, floor to ceiling. Every bookshelf, corner and cupboard had been stripped of whatever its original purpose might have been, and replaced with the task of storing Tim’s 25,000 toys, which he’s been collecting for over 50 years.

For the last five years Tim has been entertaining a vast and varied audience of millions on YouTube, becoming a perhaps surprising viral success. Taking a small selection of his toys each week to and from a studio in Buckinghamshire — which also happens to be an 18th century barn — he’s steadily built up a following of the curious, the charmed and the fanatic.

If you’re a regular user of Reddit, or perhaps occasionally find yourself in “the weird place” on YouTube after one too many clicks through the website’s dubious “related videos” section, then you’ve probably already come across Tim in one form or another. With more than 28 million views and hundreds of thousands of subscribers, he’s certainly no small presence.

You won’t know him as Tim, though. In fact, unless you’ve deliberately gone out of your way, you won’t know very much about Tim at all — he’s a private man, who’s far more interested in entertaining and educating viewers with his endless collection of toys and gadgets, which often have mathematically or scientifically curious fundamental principles, than he is in bothering you with fussy details like his full name.

Greeted with a warm and familiar hello, Tim offered us a cup of tea, a biscuit and and a seat by the fire. “Toys, everywhere, toys.” He said, looking round the room as he sat down. “I see myself as an hourglass. A large part of me is 112, a small part is my physical age and the last part is a 12-year-old boy.”

This unique mix of old and new — both literally and figuratively — certainly displays itself in his videos, of which there are upwards of 500 at rarely no more than 10 minutes in length. The formula is refreshingly simple. Tim sits at a table, demonstrates how a particular toy works, and provides background information to the piece before explaining how the mechanism inside (if it has one) functions — a particular delight for the scientifically-minded collector: “The mechanism is the key thing” he explained, “and some of them are quite remarkable. If a child breaks a toy I often think ‘oh wonderful’ because it means I can get into it.”

The apparently simple facade of the show is slightly deceptive however — Tim works with two ex-BBC producers: Hendrik Ball and George Auckland, who are responsible for editing and filming the videos. Hendrik’s passion for science (fuelled by his BSc at Bristol) ultimately landed him a job as a producer at the BBC, which he kept for 25 years, specialising in science and educational material. Hendrik has his own remarkable history in tech, having written the first website for the BBC that ever accompanied a television programme (called Multimedia Business), back in 1996, making him and George “a little nucleus of knowledge of multimedia in our department at that time”.

With few opportunities presenting themselves at the BBC to expand their newly developed skills in HTML, the two hatched a plan to create a website called Grand Illusions, which would not only sell many of the various toys and gadgets Tim came across in his collection, but would also experiment with video, with Tim as the presenter: “George and I wanted to get some more first-hand experience of running a website which would feed into our BBC work.” Said Hendrik, “so we had this idea, which closely involved a bottle of Rioja — wilder rumours say there were two bottles — and we came up with Grand Illusions. Within about a week we’d finished the website and at one point we were getting more hits than the BBC education website.”

Having only spent two hours with Tim, it’s clear why Hendrik and George were so keen to get him in front of the camera. During our time together, Tim played up to his role as the restless prestidigitator, which has afforded him such great success online — “I’m a child philosopher” he said, as he waved a parallax-inspired business card in front of us.  “You can either explore the world outside, as people do,” he placed a tiny cylindrical metal tube in my hand, “or you can explore the world inside, which is equally meaningful in my mind — there are still dragons and dangers and treasures on the inside as well as the outside world.” He then suggested throwing the cylinder in the air, and it burst into a large magic wand.

This constant conjuring was what initially piqued Hendrik’s interest: “He’s a master at it. Whenever he goes anywhere he’ll have a few toys on him. If there’s ever a lull he’ll produce one and give a quick demonstration and then everyone wants a go but, just as the excitement is peaking, Tim will bring out the next one.”

On one occasion, after a meal, Tim inflated a large balloon outside of a restaurant using a helium cylinder he stores in the boot of his car. He attached a sparkler to the balloon, lit it and then let the balloon float off into the sky. “It was an impressive end to the evening,” says Hendrik.

When we asked Hendrik what he thought the appeal of Tim’s channel was, on which nearly two million people have watched a video on Japanese zip bags and a further million on a spinning gun, he stressed that sometimes his apparent innocence worked in their favour. “Tim produced a toy some while ago, which looked like a revolver but in black rubber. It has a wire coming out of it and there’s a battery at the other end — when you press a button the end of the revolver sort of wiggles,” says Hendrik, who assures us that Tim bought this from a toy shop and has the original packaging to prove it. He also bought a rather large rubbery heart, which kind of throbs when you push a button.

Read the entire story here.

Image: Tim Rowett / Grand Illusions. Courtesy of Wired UK.