Word: highness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Collectionitis is as pervasive as inflation, as euphoric as a drug high. Its grip reaches far beyond the roseate world of Rembrandts, Sèvres porcelain and Georgian silver. A vast subculture of acquisition is feeding on scarce objects of every conceivable description. Britons are busily unearthing-and auctioneers as busily selling-such objects of dubious virtue as antique typewriters, gramophones and biscuit tins. Americans, with more catholic taste for trivia, have enshrined such unlovely objets trouvés as old flyswatters, orange reamers, apple parers, Kraft cheese jars (a.k.a. "swanky swigs"), Mickey Mousiana, player pianos, Coke bottle tops, beer...
...hobbyist or scholar who might attend a sale of arms and armor or rare folios, amateurs seldom bid for anything; mostly they were scared away. One intimidating aspect of auctions has been the seriocomic notion that by a cough or casual gesture the unwitting onlooker may become a high-rolling bidder. Only half in jest, Louis Marion, who headed the old Parke-Bernet firm and was the father of SPB's President John Marion, once cautioned: "Women who use then- catalogues to salute late-coming friends do so at their peril." In practice, a buyer who wishes to remain...
...flows toward art these days may yet produce a crisis analogous to the one that nearly sank the Bordeaux wine industry in the early 1970s. A surge of investment in Bordeaux vintages, to some extent by people who could not tell Medoc from camels' urine, shoved prices so high that traditional consumers of claret switched to Italian and other wines, thus tearing the bottom out of the market...
...getting to the point where everything that can be regarded, however distantly, as a work of art is primarily esteemed not for its ability to communicate meaning, or its use as historical evidence, or its capacity to generate aesthetic pleasure, but for its convertibility into cash. The exoticism of high price generates curiosity, and this curiosity fills the museum, turning it into a low-rating mass medium. But there it collides with an older American tradition, the 19th century reformist belief that contact with works of art is morally elevating and that museums are, in spirit, secular churches...
...back in 1961, young Jim Gabler came home from high school in Hawkins, Texas, and told his parents that he was bothered by his history textbook. When his father, Mel, read the book, Our Nation's Story, he was more than bothered; he was outraged. In a chapter on the U.S. Constitution, the book puffed up the powers of the Federal Government but minimized states' rights. Recalls Gabler: "It was teaching that Washington has complete dictatorial power...