Psychological Aspects of Art Collecting

TLDR

Art historians and psychiatrists have largely ignored the question of why people collect art, and collectors are not typically seen as psychiatric patients. The study seeks to understand the non‑monetary motives that drive art collectors to acquire works. Collectors’ motives are diverse and complex, spanning pure aesthetic appreciation to cynical or profit‑driven reasons, with non‑monetary collectors driven by a range of personal, psychological, and cultural factors.

Abstract

WHAT impels the art collector to acquire works of art? Art historians have steadfastly turned their backs on this question, and psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have not had much to say on the matter either. Patients, after all, do not seek psychiatric services because they are collectors. Yet to anyone at all familiar with art collectors, it is clear that their reasons for collecting are both diverse and complex. They may range from relatively pure ones like those suggested in the passage from Börne, just as applicable to art as to poetry, all the way to the much crasser ones alluded to by Rush. Here I shall have nothing to say about those who collect for profit pure and simple, who may even buy paintings in wholesale lots only to stash them away in a warehouse until they have risen in value. This breed, which has increased apace with the feverish growth of the art business in recent years, does not collect art for art's sake. It is rather to the collector whose motives for collecting are primarily nonmonetary that I want to turn my attention.