Episode 386- James Delbourgo on the 'Noble Madness' of collectors- from Charles Foster Kane to Norman Bates and others, and what Freud had to say about all of them

Introduction

0:00This is a conversation. It's a podcast that goes behind the scenes and between the lines of collectors and the art world. I'm Michael Shaw. Welcome to the show. This is episode 386 with James Del Borgo. He is a professor of history at Rutgers and the author of A Noble Madness, the dark side of collecting from antiquity to now. The website for this podcast is still

0:34theconversationpod.com where if you happen to be online like on the internet as opposed to just social media you can see images that go along with this particular episode including I think one that you must see if you have not seen it and maybe you've seen it and don't even remember it but it's called Pygmalion and Galatea. It's by the painter Jean-Leon Jerome and it's from 1890 and it is in

1:05the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. So it's possible that you and I have walked right by this painting on the way to something else and missed it completely but it's an awesome painting. It's actually the cover of the UK and I guess maybe Australia version of James's book. The US version which I have is not nearly as exciting. It's okay but this one is of the sculptor in the painting is kissing his sculpture of a woman who's kind of turning into

1:43slightly from stone into a female woman. Anyway I highly recommend you go check that out. You could also see images of James at the Vittoriale degli Italiani in Giardone as he would say. His pronunciations are phenomenal. You have that and so much more to look forward to. Yeah this is a conversation about a lot of things about collecting that you had not considered or nor knew. We actually

2:14talk quite a bit about the movie Psycho and the character of Norman Bates both in the movie and the book upon which the film by Alfred Hitchcock was based. We talk a little bit about some other films as well including The Collector and the archetypes around those types of collectors which is a lot more complicated than just saying those types. So you'll sort of get a broad sense of what the definition of

2:44collector is over time and in context as well. Oh and also the other movie that we talk about and you know that's based on a real person is Citizen Kane. Orson Welles's movie that is really a not accurate portrayal of William Randolph Hearst but we talk about that and the Hearst Castle and our own respective experiences at the Hearst Castle. So a lot to look forward to I think. I think you will find

3:15this very entertaining and fascinating and as a public feed listener of the show you will get to hear a little bit more than half of the full recording. To hear the full conversation of about an hour and a half you're going to want to go to patreon.com slash the conversation pod where for as little as a dollar a month you can get access to this full version of the conversation and so much more. I'm also starting to give away some books and I've had some takers via Patreon so you can check that out over there as

3:49well. You can also buy the episode as a one-off as well. Oh in lieu of film or on the subject of film as we do talk about Psycho, Citizen Kane, The Collector, others. You may have heard I'll just put this out one more time. I started a film discussion group. It is so far all artists. You are welcome to be part of the group if you are so interested. We do focus on foreign and independent films not Hollywood films. So just as a

4:24general sense of what we talk about reach out to me via social media or the conversation art podcast at gmail.com and I will fill you in and you can tell me what your top five films are to see if you're a good fit. You can of course follow us on social media at artist podcast me at Michael Shaw studio and yeah I will tell you a lot more backstory about this episode and the book and publicizing the book on the Patreon feed. You got to be a Patreon member to hear that but for now I hope you're holding up

4:58okay. I'm trying to think if there's anything else I need to tell you other than yeah hopefully it's a great listen and feel free to reach out to me and the show if you have any questions recommendations etc. In the meantime let's get to the conversation with James Del Borgo and our conversation about collecting. Thank you so much for listening. Ciao for now.

Book Discussion

5:30So James here is your book. We are finally getting to talk about it and collecting generally and for people who are not on video the title is The Noble Madness The Dark Side of Collecting From Antiquity to Now. So before we dive in officially to the book I wanted to know to what extent you've been doing or have done a book tour for it. I have been promoting the book in kind of the the normal ways not not

6:00really a book tour. A few years ago I did a very long book tour that seemed to last years in fact it seemed to just go on and on. I mean maybe that was just in my mind but no it was a very long intercontinental book tour so I didn't do that this time around but the book has been very well published and received both in the U.S. and in the U.K. so it's gone very well. Thank you.

6:34Have you not done any like talks or what have you in York or you know other obvious venues? Not that many this time around yeah to be honest so that makes me especially fresh as an interviewee for you Michael. Yeah I appreciate that. It sounds like you got a little burnout on the last round and so you're like I'm not going through that again. Is that pretty much the takeaway? Well I've been very busy I've been very busy with a number of other things

7:08including including a lot of administrative work at the university so you know you know there was that film La Double Vie de Véronique. Yes. I've had I've had I haven't been leading Véronique's life but I've had two or three different uh lives to to deal with the last few years so um you know therefore I think that the book has fended very well for itself. Okay okay it sounds exhausting James

7:40whatever it is whatever hoops uh and and characters you've been playing it sounds exhausting. I hope uh I hope there's some rest uh now or in the near future.

7:52On the contrary it's been delightful. Oh good. Long may it continue. Okay okay good good. All right

Collecting History

7:58well let's um let's talk about collecting then um both uh through your book. Well actually you know what let me let me set up this question or or our conversation about the book and collecting generally this way which is that you're a professor of history and yet prior well prior to this book you were writing a fair amount about contemporary art um including the artist Andrea Frazier uh as well as

8:29the book about collecting a book about hoarding etc which obviously became came to be a chapter in your in this book but I know we talked about this when we spoke before but but bring us up to speed on what led you to contemporary art and and where you are in relation to contemporary art now as far as like do you feel like you will inevitably be um writing about it or and or interested in it at some

9:02point in the future or it do you see it as more something in the past at this point well I suppose I have a maybe excuse me a couple of different answers to that one is in a way I was really never a very good historian because I was always interested in the present um so that you know early on when I was writing this book I would go to galleries in Chelsea and downtown and that sort of thing um and just sort of see uh what was going on and um how that was related to collecting in in general

9:38in general I'm very bad at uh uh leading just one life or following just one thread um and so in a way uh even though my work was uh very much historical um I would go to galleries and you know think you know who's actually buying this kind of thing who are collectors now uh what do they look like do they dress a certain way can you tell a collector do they have a certain manner about them

10:10uh so I was interested in um just thinking broadly and not also uh not only historically uh about collectors and indeed I once met a collector uh who was uh extremely wealthy uh who was a very intriguing uh individual uh who uh gave me a lot of ideas about what collectors might be like in general a certain um passionate devotion or obsessive uh interest and you know some people can spend too much time in the

10:49archives and not realize that in fact although things are very different from one period to the next there are certain archetypes that in fact uh are true uh when it comes to a given phenomenon or figure like the collector so I I found that there was um a lot of resonance in the in the present uh for things that I'd read about in the past and I was also essentially interested in not telling a specialized story so I'm a general historian of science and collecting and museums

11:25and intellectual history and cultural history I'm not an art historian and I'm and I'm I don't really believe in being too specialized because you actually get the story uh wrong I think so I was very interested in telling a big story over time that somehow had to be uh connected in the present so I'm not really uh somebody who has a kind of lifelong interest in contemporary art but in a way what I was doing was taking contemporary art collecting and seeing it in a deep historical context

12:04right it sounds like you put on a bit of an anthropological hat when it came to collectors perhaps well I think that's true in general in that they are fascinating creatures um and it is interesting to think about not simply what they buy but how they live how they hold themselves what kind of entity a collector is what kind of an acquisitive um calculating but also driven obsessive

12:42passionate uh even irrational uh sort of person there's a lot of there's a lot of writing about that as you know yeah yeah okay well as you're saying that and and what you were talking about before in terms of your trying to think through what a collector looks like you know what they uh talk like or what have you um I couldn't help but think that contemporary art collectors are a certain type other collectors who

13:20you profile in the book you know including living ones as opposed to ones from antiquity are a different type but I mean just for the context of this podcast or this show I mean certainly we can say that when we are in a contemporary gallery certainly a blue chip gallery uh it's pretty easy to recognize collectors in those contexts because they are being treated a certain way they're usually uh positioned

13:50near the back room if not already in it right where we can't see them but apart from that I mean what what were some of your takeaways as a putting on either putting on your anthropological hat or just your you know uh research hat well it's important to have a lot of hats and you do clearly especially especially if you live in New York where the weather is is schizophrenic as always you you need as many

14:21hats as possible you know it's from my point of view as somebody who's not really part of the art world it's fascinating how self-evident your definition of what a collector looks like they're the the powerful blue chip person who's probably invisible that most of us aren't going to see I think this is one of the things that fascinated me about um just that word collector it can suggest a very powerful person or it can

14:55suggest equally a very weak person or a very um nondescript person for example if we were to step back into the 20th century I guess really before the rise of uh extraordinarily lucrative and expensive recent contemporary art collecting that word collector probably resonated uh in a way that described

15:26somebody who was retiring shy on the surface uh normal um but who might in fact underneath that be uh somebody who was deranged dangerous a danger to the to themselves a danger to other people probably the most famous use of this idea um was in the 1960s in john fowle's novel the collector that

15:56was made into uh a film directed by william wyler starring terence stamp and samantha egger that's a film about a butterfly collector uh who was deranged and kidnaps or collects uh a young woman and this was i think the the in part because of the legacy of freudian psychoanalysis which at the end of the 19th century started to ask this question why exactly do we collect what does it mean to do so so just to

16:30connect that to what you said about the contemporary art market there's an extraordinarily um uh it's not an arc so much as a corkscrew how the profile of the collector has been changed uh i think in the last hundred years a lot of it of course is is to do with money and the power of money makes the idea of the collector seem like a more powerful figure now but if we were to go back to the freudian 20th century

17:01that word collector would be synonymous with repression psychic trouble and danger yeah right well i i i yeah i'm glad you brought up the collector and and certainly we should talk more about that and

Psycho Analysis

17:18psycho uh which you dive into in a very interesting way right alongside that book and movie i i do want to briefly i don't know if it was a freudian slip speaking of freud but you did say i want i want to call you out on saying the collectors being invisible is that i that you i caught you saying at one point i don't know if that's what you intended or what you meant but i i mean it's for me it's the it's the opposite at least in a gallery situation oh i see what you're saying yeah okay sure yeah okay no i said

17:53that really thinking of two examples that uh andy warhol liked to send people to buy at auctions for him right and when salvatore mundi the long lost uh leonardo da vinci painting a few years ago was bought by a collector in the gulf states saudi arabia i think it was 450 million dollars at the time nobody knew who who bought it right um right so that's that's maybe at yet another level from the one you were talking about right and i and i do want to make one more tangent before we finally get

18:28into the book and and starting with these films and books and that is that you briefly alluded to the the experience of visiting with a collector now i'm not sure if the collector you're referring to is the same one that i have to in the most cryptic way share about here because when we spoke before i had the pleasure of hearing about a visit you had with a collector who we can leave completely vague

19:01uh as as i imagine per your wishes um but the takeaway that i had that i so appreciated was the degree to which you experience that level of power right through money through confidence etc as a visitor in that case so i just wanted to throw that out there now in case it comes up later or just get it out of the way etc okay good no comment okay what do you want me to say well i i guess you could

19:38clarify if when you were referring to the collector a little while ago if that's the same one or if it's another collector that you're referring to oh sure so let's let's say it's the same one uh so so yeah collectors um i guess the figures i was mentioning i i was mentioning were um you know uh people whose power does reside in their um invisibility in certain ways um when it comes to the actual uh

20:09act of collecting and that i suppose you know what we're talking about um is the the the corkscrew of of of status and distinction making and differentiation is it an elite thing to do to be a brash visible collector or is it a vulgar thing to do that a true collector issues because the ultimate form of power

20:40is invisibility so it's an interesting uh question in terms of cultural mentality economic position social status as to how that question plays out did you come up with the corkscrew metaphor or was that already out there because that's a good one you know michael i use corkscrews all the time when it comes to opening fine bottles of wine i i i favor the corkscrew okay all right excellent well said okay

21:16well i have a lot uh that we could talk about first of all i mean for people listening just to you know not to sort of tease people for too long uh you really do talk a lot about i think a heart of the sort of modern section of the book as opposed to the antiquity section of the book does get into

Pop Culture References

21:38certain uh parts of pop culture vis-a-vis collecting and interestingly and and for i think listeners including myself surprisingly you talk a lot about psycho and one of the things that you talk about regarding psycho is the original book that the movie was based on in which norman bait the norman bates character is in fact as opposed to the very charming uh you know even sort of the the character that that

22:11that's sort of hard to maybe paint as an anti-hero because he's so charming you know anthony perkins is as opposed to that character the norman bates in the robert block pulp fiction classic as you call it from 1959 is this i don't know if nebbishy is the right word that for some reason that came up but but uh but this this perhaps well as you put it i i because i have it here pacey and punchy uh oh no i'm sorry forgive me that is that is what you called the book let's see um well i'll let you

22:47describe the character in the book but all to say that you were talking about more of a uh reserved or even kind of uh receding and weak that's the word i was looking for you were talking about a weak individual so uh i guess i'll to ask so norman bates in the book is is sort of the quintessential weak collector yes um the the word for norman bates in robert block's 1959 novel psycho is ugly

23:24he's ugly he's bespectacled he is fat he is not prepossessing uh so he in that sense represents the collector as as an ugly loser and a nobody you can go right back to the 19th

Collector Archetypes

23:39century you can go back to balzac's 1840s novel cousin pons about a paris uh collector of old masters uh sylvain pons and pons is unprepossessing the whole point that balzac made really half a century before freud was that this is a loser at life he's intelligent his career hasn't gone well romantically he's a failure but he's a great collector he knows how to spot a great work of

24:14art and buy it for very little money so as uh balzac writes the uh collection is his concert consolation and he describes it as sa maitresse it's his mistress it's his romantic consolation uh essentially freud around 1900 will say the same thing but in a in a in a rather more elaborate psychoanalytical way that according to to freud really uh uh not citing balzac uh explicitly but using

24:51this idea collecting is another way to pursue love when love with other people doesn't work objects will love us back so if you jump forward another half century to robert bloch writing psycho bloch is immersed in what by then is the unavoidable popular influence of freudian psychoanalysis many hitchcock films of course show this very clearly the most obvious example is spellbound

25:26with uh ingrid bergman and gregory peck but a lot of uh hitchcock films are essentially explorations of of freudian problems and psycho is a perfect uh expression of this idea because the very first time we experience the character of norman bates he is sitting in his parlor with janet lee who plays marion crane who was uh stolen a lot of money stopped at the bates motel they have dinner

26:02and they have dinner in a parlor where norman bates is surrounded by stuffed birds a whole collection including dioramas uh of meticulously stuffed animals arranged uh very carefully uh in a kind of static private world that if you like is the first image of norman bates that hitchcock uh slips in and in later interviews where uh famously hitchcock discussed over many hours a bit like we're doing today although for

26:39much longer with francois truffaut hitchcock said the birds were intended to be a kind of psychoanalytical clue uh that all was not as it appeared uh with norman bates the final thing to say there of course is that uh initially norman bates looks for all the world like a completely dominated man completely dominated by his mother and so there's such a an intense attention there to the apparent

27:15psychological and emotional weakness of this character who is trapped uh in this relationship but who of course turns out to be the aggressor and that it seems to me is one of the

Norman Bates Character

27:28the ongoing themes in the presentation of the collector over the the arc of modern cultural history there's a very clear uh predecessor for this that i will mention just briefly and that is of course oscar wilde's the picture of dorian gray in the 1890s where dorian gray in some ways is a precursor of that figure an aesthetic an art lover who becomes a connoisseur uh part of a very refined

27:59world but within uh dorian gray lurks a kind of mortal uh psychotic uh homicidal potential so dorian gray and norman bates look like completely completely different characters of course they certainly have completely different class positions completely different educational uh background and so on and yet it's a very interesting link that they have this uh image of the collector as so refined

28:35as to be really beyond uh uh normal uh ordinary interactions but in fact potentially so tormented within that they pose uh a danger either to themselves or to other people that other people can't see in them

28:58by the way i i this is going to feel a little trivial but i i can't help but bring it up since you wrote about it uh as part of your analysis of the film the hitchcock take on psycho which was that in in addition to the taxidermy birds on the wall it's marion crane right and in fact as you and as you as you as you argue or or state it's even more to sort of give the sense that norm bates is the hunter and

29:35crane is the hunted yes that was all changed for the film so you're right to bring it up um because originally in in the block novel norman norman bates is a fat ugly man who stuffs squirrels okay it really was uh uh a transformation uh the casting of of anthony perkins because it made i think a squalid pulp fiction villain into a handsome charming uh uh uh elegant respectable um thoroughly ingratiating

30:16kind of figure who who therefore positions the audience on on his side that i think was really

Hitchcock Film

30:21a stroke of genius so it took something inside in the in the novel psycho that was kind of squalid and ugly and and put it in a form where the audience had to fall in uh with norman bates which is not to say that the original norman bates as robert bloch wrote him uh was not a very interesting character he certainly was you know we we see for example um or we learn in the book that he reads uh deeply into

30:54anthropology he he reads about the lives of savages he reads about human sacrifice and so there is there is a uh an intellectual uh background to norman bates that that comes through uh the novel that is different from the film and it's also worth pointing out very briefly that he believes in the book uh that that actually his taxidermy his preservation of his mother's corpse is actually a form of magic

31:27that he is literally back to life not merely as it were as a result of his schizophrenia so interestingly in the in the novel uh norman bates is not a prepossessing character um but he's also not a very modern character he believes in magic and he believes that to collect and assemble body parts literally does bring somebody back to life and this is essentially all purged in the film where we have

31:59a very handsome protagonist who is essentially positioned uh as a as a kind of psychoanalytic or psychological case study the anthropology is completely edited out um there's a through line that you expressed or alluded to in talking about the block or baits era collector and then going back to balzac and i'm not going to be able to nail the exact tone but

32:31the gist of it was that the collector weakling or ugly as you the word you used earlier it was the collector who was unable to have romantic relationships either because of their ugliness their nebbish enos you know to use that word again etc um and i couldn't help but think okay so if that was the uh circa turn of the 20th century model and then circa mid-century model

Incel Comparison

33:11is is not today i i mean this is not a collector model but is that not sort of the precursor to the incel type well um how do you you sound like you you have made a connection between incels and collectors in this case apparently i have but we're talking about other documented cases uh okay well maybe why don't we frame it this way the way that you were describing norman bates and and it sounded like

33:47like in regard to characters of the balzac area if i remember right um was a guy i i i seem to have the sense that it that it's a male character not a female one who right who is um in addition to sort of having this interaction with stuff right because that's that's where they have power and control they don't have any control over their romantic lives or their you know potential romantic

34:25lives that was the the the through line that i was trying to draw is that one that you can see i see

34:34it's not the way i would describe it i would mention a couple of things however that i think come more out of the history itself um one is um the history of same-sex love of course oscar wilde uh was homosexual um and there are readings of the picture of dorian gray uh that point out essentially that some of the earlier drafts before the most famous uh later reprinted edition uh has more explicit language about um

35:07same-sex love between uh dorian gray and the artist basil holward who who paints him so there's an argument with great credibility that the story of dorian gray and the torment that dorian gray uh experiences is uh related um to some extent to to the troubles that that oscar wilde experienced in his own uh biography i wouldn't want to reduce what is a very uh multi-level uh supernatural gothic uh horror

35:41story to that one biographical fact but it's but it's clearly relevant and um of course you know norman bates could be seen depending on what language we want to use as either partly a camp figure or a queer figure um when susan sontag for example is writing about collecting later on i think it's in the 1960s uh she wrote an essay about camp style in collecting emphasizing a certain eclecticism a certain

36:15riotous variety of juxtaposing many different kinds of things as a kind of well her word was a camp style maybe people today would say queer style more yeah uh uh more more readily um so there is a a genealogy there of a position of a male collector who uh may well uh be somebody who uh is part of this uh on the one hand a kind of troubled history or socially troubled history of

36:49of same-sex relationships and and repressed uh desires this certainly came it was also an idea of course in in freudian uh uh psychoanalysis on the other hand and i think complementary to that not intrinsic and not unique to such men was the idea uh that was talked about by oscar wilde actually in the late 19th century and many others that surrounding oneself with beautiful things

37:22coming out of the late victorian era into the early 20th century was a form of spiritual offered a form of spiritual healing that there was it was a uh what was known as the house beautiful movement and the many wealthy people who filled their homes with many different kinds of of beautiful decorative arts as as well as art and sculpture and who made very beautiful house museums for themselves this in a sense was uh partly a result of a belief in the idea that beautiful things were good for the soul and that

37:58collecting was uh therefore kind of the highest aesthetic and spiritual uh life that that uh that one could lead and there were many women uh who were part of that uh we're talking about the era of uh gertrude stein but i'm thinking of other collectors um as she was of modern art and of decorative arts like mabel dodge lujan who was from buffalo new york who spent a lot of time in italy ended up in the taos art colony in new mexico and

38:33mabel dodge is a very interesting example because she's very much part of that late victorian house beautiful movement uh but ultimately as somebody who reads freud engages very heavily with psychoanalysis and comes to regard all of these beautiful trappings not as the liberation of the soul but as a gilded cage so within that range of personal and cultural factors uh i think we have a a picture of the different currents that

39:07um animated an idea that to be a collector of beautiful things and to surround yourself with beauty um was the uh part of the pursuit of one's self-realization which then people came to question i think in no small part through psychoanalytic introspection this is a bit of a just a little aside but i can't help but wonder as you were describing the

Research Process

39:39beautiful collections house beautiful movement you mentioned particular to what extent through your book research process um did you get to go to some of these locations and to what extent in retrospect now you feel like getting to see some of these things whether it be you know the house beautiful or and or you know more contemporary collections to what extent that is is key to your research or if it's just kind of like more of a side benefit that is a very good

40:17question i actually believe it's very central and you know before you asked me about these collectors well i didn't meet that many of them um and they did have an impact on me i i think actually going to some of these houses um was much more important for my thinking and for my imagination i suppose in a way it's the old situation of if you have a house in a collection i was sort of reproducing the argument in my book if you have a house in a collection you start to want to deduce what sort of person

40:53made this place yeah what kind of fingerprint is this what what smell in terms of uh who who am i who am i detecting whose presence animated this place i think that was more um inspiring because it was more more open and more suggestive um and there are two examples i can give of uh houses that i visited um that were very rewarding and very suggestive one is hearst castle in uh just near san luis obispo

41:32san simeon yeah exactly uh uh william randolph hearst the inspiration for orson wells who did not think

Hearst Castle Visit

41:40very highly of randolph hearst i think i think hearst tried to sue him after he thought that citizen cane was uh uh a kind of libelous assault on everything that hearst stood for of course hearst was a newspaper tycoon uh and a great collector um but if you remember the image in the famous image in citizen cane is that cane when he becomes rich and wealthy in the film and he actually is born he's he he's adopted and he's from an early age wealthy before he becomes a uh a great newspaper grandee he goes on a grand

42:15tour of europe he buys so much art he never even opens the crates that was the kind of image of acquisitive futility that orson wells wanted to torment hearst with and he and he did even though he got hearst wrong in the end of that film you know hearst uh uh famous very cane famously uh dies alone and the newspaper reporters look at his collection they say well can we figure out what the key to his

42:46life was based on the the art he bought and that is that is the gambit of of the film and um you know from from wells's point of view he was trying to say that this was all empty soulless acquisition you know it was an early dig at uh art art collecting as soulless it's just money these people are gloomy depressives which in fact in real life william randolph hearst was not he and and hearst castle was very social he had guests all the time cary grant charlie chaplin i mean it was constant turnover and he

43:18ran his newspaper empire uh from there so going there given its remoteness um and given i suppose what struck me about hearst castle was the fact that um a couple of things that if i'm if i'm remembering correctly hearst delegated a lot of his collecting to a woman who worked for him whose name escapes me who was essentially very involved in acquisition that's part of it the other part was that in a sense

43:51that collecting was not so much because a given work of art was incredibly valuable to them instead it was how do we create a nicely aesthetically coherent space and match things together in other words it was a it was a a form of collecting that was at a bit of a remove not that personal and really to do with the kind of social stage management uh to create an environment to to receive uh guests

44:21i mean that that actually just in a way detonated all of the cliches about hearst that wells had tried to project through citizen kane that he was a recluse that he was that he was uh depressed gloomy isolated uh that sort of gothic image of the collector as somebody who withdraws from society turns in on themselves and just kind of rots in the in the tomb of their own treasures like some sort of modern

44:53pharaoh in the film it's called xanadu after all so that was a very interesting uh experience before the other one before you go to the next one uh uh james i i just i before you leave hearst i wanted to ask a question and then would just make a very brief uh comment which is that um when i was i've been to hearst castle twice once when i was a kid and i did i think we did the full tour with my family when i was a kid and in the immense dining room you know with the dining table

45:27you know for like 30 people or whatever on the table there was a bottle of heinz ketchup i believe

45:37so i just wanted to mention that but my question can i mention something about the dinner table yeah the story i was told on our tour which i which i take to be true is that guests would stay for several days and when they arrived they might be in favor and they might be of a special interest to mr hurst so they would be seated right next to him at dinner but sometimes he might tire of certain people so

46:11michael if you or i said the wrong thing or we were boring the next day at dinner we might be sat at the far end from the great man and that was the way they ran the dinner places that james that is such an important observation because what you really hit on is you're talking about the version of a collector and and maybe this is far too universal to apply just to a collector but the one who needs to be

46:47be entertained at absolute top level you know and if they are disappointed you're gone

46:57well i think i think there is something to that in the sense of the the collector as the the puppeteer the the orchestrator who has enough wealth because they're the great collector to not only collect things but in a sense orchestrate people right as part of their collection right right yeah exactly so the other thing that i wanted to mention before you give your other example about citizen kane and uh

47:29orson wells's take on hearst allegedly um is you mentioned the crates of artworks unopened uh was wells incredibly prescient or just lucky in inevitably referring to the high-end uh tombs of storage facilities that have become uh so filled with expensive artworks these days well that's a good

48:02point maybe he was a little prescient um you know he what i can say is that in interviews um after the film came out he essentially rejected the freudian uh the viability of the freudian idea not so much freud himself but his followers they were very keen on the idea that you could look at a collection as a set of clues as to the inner life of the individual they didn't just tell you about taste or about

48:38personality they told you deeper darker things about troubles childhood trauma wells thought this was funny he thought it was uh a truism uh a shibboleth just uh uh an endlessly repeated shallow hack piece of uh biographical interpretation that and he he in a way he showcases that in the film because in the film

49:08you have that prescient image of this vast storehouse of things that never gets opened and then is either carted off or burned at the end of the film uh and that's orson welles sort of thumbing his nose at freudian psychoanalysis saying no you can't

49:30decode a man's or a person's life based on uh purely what they what they owned um for for wells according to what he said the idea was was essentially a much more social economic critique of of economic excess so in fact i think he was he was speaking the language that that you were just speaking it was in a way looking forward to pure meaningless excess you're that wealthy you buy

50:01meaninglessly more than you can possibly appreciate yeah that's great okay you want to get to your other example absolutely so now we go to italy to northern italy to lake garda and just north of lake garda in

Vittoriale Degli Italiani

50:17the town of gardone well worth a visit you will find a very special villa called the vittoriale degli italiani uh this was a villa that was owned by uh gabriele d'annuncio who was an italian poet provocateur journalist politician uh pilot he was everything in a way he was one of those classic early 20th century modernist figures

50:50uh who uh in some ways was a precursor to uh mussolini although he disliked he disliked uh mussolini and didn't trust mussolini um and and died gabriele d'annuncio died essentially before fascism really took hold in italy in the in the especially in the the 20s and 30s but d'annuncio was a very strong nationalist uh but he was also a kind of classic modernist visionary poet so his house

51:24the vittoriale uh is filled with all kinds of objects and it's completely stuffed again it's it's a it's a fascinating case of a of a collector as somebody i think whose intelligence wants to sit behind an orchestrate as we just said with hearst for example at the entrance way to the villa before you go in and see all the books and see all the decorative arts and see all the artifacts and see

51:58things like a head of a horse from the elgin marbles a copy but actually d'annuncio himself apparently used uh tea to make it look aged and authentic that was actually done to this cast of one of the horse heads of the parthenon marbles but before you even got inside there was a little stairway and at the top of the stairway there were two doors two ways in one way in was the way in for the people d'annuncio

52:33regarded as friends the other way in was a door for people he didn't regard as friends in other words uh again this is that era the late 19th the early 20th century this is the house beautiful movement these are whatever we make of their politics extraordinary individuals wealthy talented ambitious inspired by the extraordinary changes of their times technology uh the extraordinary

53:07intensity and danger of those times uh they're not simply putting beautiful houses together to

53:16improve themselves as it were spiritually or aesthetically they are trying to realize a sort of commanding form of life in which the people who enter that house become part of the collection and can be moved around the house in different ways so in a way that's quite similar to to hearst even though i think d'annuncio was a very very different sort of person but going to that house i think was extraordinary for the following reason uh because of his associations with fascism as a kind of proto

53:54pre-fascist nationalist uh d'annuncio has a very checkered reputation in italy uh he also wrote very melodramatic novels uh with titles like il piacere pleasure and he was one of the if you like one of the great decadent novelists writing in the 1880s 90s same time as oscar wilde same time as uh jk wismance uh in paris

54:26so he's he's he's he's part of that era and you you go to the um house and you expect the experience to be uh well how how can i put this you have a kind of an image in your mind of how the collections may affect you based on what you know about him but when you enter the house it has extraordinary charisma

54:56the views of the lake are extraordinary it has very strange things for example outside on the grounds there is a small prow of a military ship that d'annuncio actually collected and incorporated as part of the hillside so there's a surreal element to it but beyond all of those elements it has a grandeur and a charisma and an interest that i think to some extent transcend the the the checkered nature of the the

55:31biography so that was a remarkable experience i think perhaps more intense than than hearse castle given that d'annuncio is a more charged figure but it's a wonderful place to visit because i think your reactions to it are not straightforward they're not just one reaction i think you have many reactions and in a sense therefore that's a real collection that's a living collection you can't go there and

56:01say this is just a fascist collection or a fascist it's that's the interesting thing about it i can't help but wonder whether when you do you get to go in through the two separate entrances right and does one is one superior to the other i i think you'd have to go michael let's let's all go back and check for ourselves because i can't remember it was it was some years ago uh that's that's a very you know that's

56:31an interesting detail then the point is that he was he was like hearst somebody who was not just the collector but an orchestrator i can't help but wonder when you go into just you know colleagues or whomever friends homes whether in new york city or elsewhere to what degree you bring your historian but more like sort of now collector conscious hat into the room you know what i mean

57:03i mean i think as artists i think myself as an artist i think i do it inevitably like okay let's see what we got on the walls here or you know or sculptures or what have you uh you know and and whether it the home falls somewhere closer to the college dorm room end of the spectrum right or to the ambitious you know collecting with what limited means we have kind of end of the spectrum you know what i mean it's just a question that occurred to me as you were talking about particularly this the

57:37italian uh home that you visited well i suppose what i've learned is that whether it's deliberate or accidental intended or in a sense just a phenomena uh a byproduct of the way people arrange things no matter what the degree of intentionality and effect is created and so therefore you may as well pay attention both to the effect and its production because essentially things perform in space

58:17it can be very carefully orchestrated it can be carelessly incidental but that that encounter with a person's place with their things is it doesn't merely create an impression i think it is a physical experience that constitutes the way you understand this person and indeed your relationship to them that space those things put you in a certain kind of relationship to that to that person you know freud

58:55in his um original uh psychoanalytical uh medical practice in vienna had many of his um classical sculptures many figurines many statues paintings around uh his uh place of psychoanalytic uh care so that that the the people who came to engage in psychoanalysis would see them would be aware of them and would have the

59:30opportunity in some ways to to react to them we don't know i think in great detail but we do know for example that the poet hd hilda dolittle wrote about the fact that as an educated person herself as somebody versed in the history of classical civilization these objects were meaningful to her there was a shared frame of reference and uh they were to her a kind of a an offer or a challenge

1:00:02or a gambit on freud's part i think our impression is that he didn't quiz or uh directly uh engage people about them of course that was not the freudian way of proceeding the freudian way of proceeding was one in which the truth is elicited obliquely not directly the freudian slip truth comes out accidentally when the psychic defenses of the

1:00:35individual are not up and on guard so these objects that that to some extent populated the space of psychoanalysis in those early years of course when this was a rather elite clientele with a shared educational background and a shared set of cultural references but that's a particular example of the way in which the presence of those objects for some of those patients did constitute the experience of

1:01:07of what it meant to be psychoanalyzed and what it meant to to actually be uh in conversation with sigmund freud so it's not that every single of my friends or colleagues apartments are set up like that but nevertheless i i have come to appreciate that how we orchestrate the physical contents of our um places of uh meeting always constitutes in part the quality of the meeting do you do you not find

1:01:45that as well i mean that's a yeah it's an interesting point i think what i was thinking just before you finished your point is that i think when i go into a space ideally i am set at ease right by whatever configuration is going on obviously the hosting you know is crucial as well but generally i think i'm either set at ease or on one end of the spectrum i'm really intrigued by maybe some of the work

1:02:20in the home or on the other end want to get the hell out of there right yes so deeply disturbed you realize that coming was a big mistake right yeah yeah okay i think uh i i it's it's hard to follow up with any of that um i was going to say well it sounds like you're implicitly but now i think we're kind of explicitly supporting the freudian take on uh the way that one puts together their home are we not not well i wouldn't i just well i wouldn't say there are no accidents uh which became a kind of

1:03:01freudian uh truism that that i would not say there's plenty of accidents okay um but you know those accidents of space of display um also constitute relations between people they will you know if you if you if you leave something out that you don't want to leave out that somebody then sees it doesn't mean i would say that it is a freudian slip but that element of contingency can indeed

1:03:37color an impression change a relationship um so you know you know what you know the standard with freud is everybody says oh it's all ridiculous and overdone and offensive but we all still think not not in the details but we we can we can reject the details because our entire culture learned the language learn learn the way of looking and never so

1:04:10so so so We'll be right back.