June 18, 2020 • 41 mins
Dragons hoard treasure, deep in their lairs. They don’t show it off to their neighbors. Revisionist History applies dragon psychology to the strange world of art museums, with help from Andy Warhol, J.R.R. Tolkien, a handful of accountants and the world’s leading hoarding expert.
Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Starting today, if you don't live in New York State,
you're gonna have to pay a mandatory entrance fee to
visit the Metropolitan Museum. Eyewitness News ABC seven, New York,
March first, twenty eighteen. The new policy was announced in January,
but it took effect today. Adults who do not have
(00:37):
ID proving that they live right here in New York
have to pay twenty five dollars. Seniors will pay seventeen dollars.
If I had to pinpoint the beginning of my obsession
with art museums, it would be the moment the Metropolitan Museum,
one of the greatest museums in the world, decided to
impose entrance fees. It was a difficult time for the institution.
(00:59):
They had a forty million dollar deficit. They got rid
of ninety employees, Exhibitions were canceled, there was a shake
up in the leadership. Up and down the Upper East
Side of Manhattan, there was hand ringing and a great
gnashing of teeth. I remember one New York Times headline
from that time, is the met Museum a great institution
(01:21):
in decline. That was followed by one expression of anguish
after another, including this from the former chairman of the
Met's Drawings and Print Department. To have inherited a museum
as strong as the MET was ten years ago, with
a great curatorial staff, and to have it be what
(01:42):
it is today is unimaginable. Well exactly because for the
life of me, I couldn't imagine how it was. The
Met was crying poverty. I mean, they have one of
the largest and most valuable art collections in the world
one point five million objects. What's all that art worth?
(02:02):
I don't know, A hundred billion dollars more. The MET
might be the richest nonprofit institution in human history. All
they would have to do is pick a couple things
off the shelf and they'd never see a deficit again.
This is like Jeff Bezos firing the gardener because he's
out of cash. Just go to the ATM, Jeff. But
(02:23):
they couldn't do it. They would rather fire people and
make a family of four cough up to one hundred
dollars at the gate than even think of parting with
a single one of their possessions. Why it's a puzzle,
And it is for puzzles like this that we have
revisionist history. My name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to
(02:50):
my podcast about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This is our
fifth season, five years of digression, high dudgeon, needless provocation,
and my absolute favorite grand unified theories. In this season
of revisionist History, I want to explore our emotional attachment
(03:10):
to objects and rituals and tradition and the way in
which those attachments portray us. And in this first episode,
I would like to make sense of the strange relationship
of the art world to art. During his thirty one
(03:40):
year tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Philippe de Matabello, the Met's eighth and longest serving director,
guided the acquisition of more than eighty four thousand works
of art. I found this in a video series called
Great Museums, an episode from twenty ten and Acquiring mind
(04:00):
lots of wide angle shots of marble floored galleries and
gilt frame paintings. NPR Susan Stamberg narrates over what sounds
like an orchestra right there on the set. Born in France,
educated at Harvard in nineteen sixty three, Demande Bello brought
a background in European pay The film runs for an hour.
It's about the most famous director of the Met, Philippe
(04:22):
du Montebello, descendant of a noble French family. In particular,
it's about how much stuff Philippe Dumontebello bought during his
thirty one year tenure as head of the Met. Tapestries,
African sculptures, a fabulous premier, an evening gown that's to
die for. He even bought things he didn't want to buy.
Philippe has been an incredible director for supporting the acquisitions
(04:46):
of objects of great quality from across the globe. It
goes on and on about the acquiring, to the point
where you wonder, or at least I wondered, Wait, I
thought you didn't have any money Today, nearly two million objects,
comprising an encyclopedic treasury of world art, are contained in
(05:07):
the Met's growing election. Apparently I was wrong in the numbers.
Not one point five million objects, two million objects. Let
me give you an example, maybe my favorite example of
this weirdness in the art world. It has to do
with a public hearing held in July of nineteen ninety
one at the Financial Accounting Standards Board, better known as
(05:31):
the f a SB. The FASB is the Vatican of
the American accounting profession, and this was one of the
occasional open sessions the FAB holds in order to share
with the broader American public subjects of grave concern to
the accounting universe. The venue was the FASB's Norwalk, Connecticut headquarters.
(05:52):
The subject accounting for contributions received and contributions made, and
capitalization of works of art, historical treasures, and similar assets.
The room was packed. They videotaped the proceedings so people
could watch in the overflow room. I've read a transcript
of the hearing, all nine hundred and forty seven pages
(06:13):
of it, and I would like to direct your attention
to a particular exchange. It was between the then chairman
of the f a s B, Dennis Beresford, and a
man named C. Douglas Dillon. Dillon was a tall man,
gray suit patrician a certain stature. He was former director
(06:35):
of Dillon, Read and Coe, the Wall Street firm founded
by his father, and was possessed of maybe the greatest
resume in mid century America. US Treasury Secretary from much
of the nineteen sixties, Ambassador to France, chair of the
Brookings Foundation, president of the Harvard Board of Overseers, a
close friend of John Rockefeller the third, a world class
(06:57):
collector of Impressionist art, and, most relevant for the purposes
of the hearing that day, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York City. The American Establishment sent
its biggest gun to confront the FASB over the agency's
proposal to change the rules surrounding the accounting for contributions
(07:20):
received and contributions made, and capitalization of works of art,
historical treasures, and similar assets. The accountants wanted the art
world to follow the same accounting rules as other businesses.
Dylan versus Dennis Beresford, chairman of the FASB, member of
the American Accounting Hall of Fame and the Financial Executive's
(07:42):
International Hall of Fame. Way back on day one of
the proceedings in question, Beresford had made it plain that
he wasn't going to stand for any nonsense. So C.
Douglas Dillon was restrained in his objections. Gracious, I'm going
to guess this was his first visit to Norwalk, Connecticut.
The room must have been hushed, right, I mean, it's C.
(08:05):
Douglas freaking Dillon. He does a little preamble, carefully explains
how outraged the MET is at the intrusion of accountants
into their business, launches into a vivid description of the
extraordinary size of the met's collection. And then, and this
is maybe my favorite part of the entire nine hundred
and forty seven page transcript, Dilan says, quote, we have
(08:29):
a new curator of Islamic art, been with us for
a couple of years now. We have certainly the greatest
collection of Islamic rugs in the Western Hemisphere, one of
the two or three in the world. He has never
been able to even see that collection because so much
of it is in storage and is so difficult to
(08:50):
get out, so costly and time consuming. That he knows
by the records what they are, but he hasn't been
able to look at them. C. Douglas Dillon is speaking
to an audience of accountants. Accountants are people who like
to count things. More than that, they are people who believe,
(09:11):
as a matter of deep professional principle, that everything can
be counted. And they have proposed that the art world
agree to start counting things like everyone else. And in response,
this pillar of the American Establishment shows up in suburban
Connecticut and says, we can't count our things. There's just
(09:31):
too many of them. They're all buried somewhere in storage.
To give you an example, the guy who was responsible
for Islamic rug collection, maybe the greatest Islamic rug collection
in the world, mind you, has never even seen our
Islamic rug collection. I have to say, this is where
the art world loses me. So I called up the
(09:55):
staffer at the FSB who organized that hearing all those
long years ago. His name is Ron Bassio. Just retired.
This is a good exercise for a seventy three year
old to test the memory to go back. Yes, I'm
very I'm very impressed. Basio returned to his old offices
at FASB headquarters to take my call so he would
(10:18):
have access to the critical documents. So I'm just going
to pull up the financial statements of the Metropolitan Museum
and I want to just want to very briefly walk through.
I was just I was just wondering if that could
be googled up here as well. Yeah, he's on his computer,
I'm on mine. We're downloading the Metropolitan Museum of Arts
(10:40):
twenty nineteen annual report and locating the crucial part the
statements of financial position. Beginning on page forty four, I
have cash receivable for investments sold retail inventories. These are
all straightforward accounts receivable, straightforward contributions receivable, and thanks the pledges.
(11:04):
Financial statements for almost any organization look pretty much the same.
You start by listing your assets, everything of value. Then
you list your liabilities loans, mortgages, pension obligations. Then you
balance them. That's why it's called a balance sheet. Bassio
and I are going down the list of the METS assets.
Then there's investments, which I'm assuming is the endowment. Could
(11:28):
be endowment or it could be just investments in total.
They may not all be part of the endowment. Then
I have fixed assets three hundred and ninety three million,
and then I have collections and I have nothing. It's
supposed to be a precise accounting of everything the MET
has of value, the amount the museum made last year
(11:49):
from selling stocks, the amount of cash it has on
hand its endowment, the amount it's owed from various creditors,
the amount it god in gifts and donations, even the
value of the inventory in its gift shop everything, and
they add it all up and they come up with
a number total assets. But next to the line item
(12:10):
entitled collections, that is to say, the millions of unimaginably
rare and precious art objects owned by the museum, the
eighteen van goes, the forty six Picassos, the twenty Rembrandts.
There is no dollar figure, nothing, It's blank. All it
says is c note A. Okay ah here it is
(12:32):
note A. In the appendix it says, in conformity with
accounting policies generally followed by art museums, the value of
the museum's collections has been excluded from the statement of
financial position. Excluded. This is a multi billion dollar organization
(12:53):
with billions and billions of dollars in art, and it's
none of it is listed on their in the financial statement.
It seems I don't I don't even understand how that
style that was Your reaction is similar to the reaction
that some of our board members had. On top of that,
it turns out that the met would rather charge admission,
(13:15):
cut exhibitions, and get rid of ninety people than sell anything,
even though they have so many things like Islamic rugs,
that the guy running the Islamic rug collection hasn't even
seen any of Islamic rugs because they're all in storage somewhere.
In fact, most of the met's collection is in storage,
huge football field sized warehouses, presumably somewhere in New Jersey,
(13:39):
full of stuff. And when the FASB says, why don't
you tell us, like a normal institution, just how much
your stuff is worth? Because I don't know. Maybe it
would be easier to think rationally about how to run
things if you knew that fact, the MET goes crazy,
dispatches c Douglas Dillon to Norwa, Connecticut to say never,
(14:00):
not on my watch. We've never done that and we
never will. Yeah, this is unlike any other business. You're
supposed to carry assets at either book or market value,
and you're supposed to put them in your financial reports,
and they don't. This is Michael O'Hare, who teaches in
(14:22):
the Business School at Berkeley. If you ask anyone, anyone
who knows their way around a balance sheet about the
way museums record their assets, you get the Michael O'Hare response.
I was talking about this at some conference and somebody
from an orchestra, some financial person from an orchestra said,
wait a minute, you mean you buy a painting and
(14:43):
then it just disappears. And that's what happens. There's an
expense and then that's the last we hear about it
in the financial records. It's quite it's quite bizarre. For
the longest time, I would bore everyone I met with
how strange I found all this until one day I
was in Holland on my book tour. In Leiden, out
(15:04):
with a bunch of people in a bar, and I
told the group the story of the epic showdown between
Dennis Beresford and C. Douglas Dillon, and this one guy,
a philosopher, said, Oh, it's like Smog. Smog, the dragon
from the Hobbit who sits on a mountain of treasure.
Smog doesn't want to use his gold, he doesn't wear
(15:25):
it out to dragon social events. He does not list
his holdings on his annual dragon financial statement. He just
wants to hoard it. And I'm like, oh, my god, Smog, Yes,
that explains everything. Was an old dragon and a gray stone.
(15:46):
His red eyes blinked as he lay alone. His joy
was dead and his youth spent. He was knobbed and wrinkled,
and his limbs bent in the long years to his
gold Jane, his heart furnished the fired way. This is J. R. R.
Tolkien reading his poem The Horde to his belly's slime
(16:08):
gem stuck child and Goldie with snuff and lick to
his bellies slime gems stuck thick. That's what happens when
a dragon sits on his treasure for too long, and
the stuff that couldn't fit under his belly the dragon
has buried deep inside his lair in storage. Following that
(16:46):
epiphany in the bar in Leiden, I resolved to perform
a field test of the hypothesis that art museums are
modern day versions of the dragon's smog. This was a
few months back. I was going to be in Pittsburgh
for another reason anyway, so I decided to pay a
visit to the Andy Warhol Museum, the largest museum devoted
(17:07):
to a single artist in North America. So I made
an appointment with the museum's curator of art, Jessica Beck,
and on a bright and cold morning in Pittsburgh, I
headed out to the city's North Shore neighborhood to the
beautiful Old Warehouse that holds the museum. I told Beck
I didn't want to see just the collection, the art
on the walls. I wanted to see everything. So Beck
(17:31):
graciously took me upstairs to the archives. We're just off
the staircase. There were dozens of brown cardboard boxes stacked
in neat piles. Oh I see. Oh they're like they're
covered in the plastic and you know, capped behind glass. Yeah,
(17:52):
so this again is just a portion of the murder
whole mother. Yeah, how many are here? The cardboard boxes?
How's what Warhol called his time capsules. There are six
hundred and ten of them in total. He would put
things in these cardboard box boxes, tape them shut, and
set them aside. But he also had other boxes, idea
(18:14):
boxes what are called basement boxes. After Warhol died, everything
was shipped to Pittsburgh in an armada of tractor trailers.
The museum's best guests is in their archive. They have
at least five hundred thousand objects. And so all the
other boxes are behind our door. Yeah, the rest of
them are back there. Yeah, but it's not it's not
(18:35):
something I can see that I'm not sure, and I
can ask, we can find out because I wasn't sure.
We found one of Warhol's time capsules that had been opened.
It was on the counter like a patient, eitherized upon
a table. We peered inside. So this is his fifties suits,
nineteen fifty six, Hong Kong, so his first trip to Asia.
(18:59):
A lot of them are closed right now because we're
sort of trying to figure out how to keep the
objects from shifting. I was suddenly curious. I wanted to
see inside one of the clothes boxes. Beck said she
didn't have the authority to open one up, but she
made a few calls. Finally she found someone. Oh, okay,
we have something. Okay, that's take a look. Another of
(19:23):
the museum's staff hurried towards us. This is John, So
we're just going to peek into one, just to get
a sense of I was splaining, you know that a
lot of things are unfolders, but um, so they're they're heavy. Yeah, yeah,
they're you know, like way forty or fifty pounds in
(19:43):
some cases. John positioned himself in front of the box
and began opening it up. His movements were assured, practiced. So, yeah,
we treat the media box itself like it's part of
an object, So that's why were the gloves. So these
would have been boxes that Andy would have this assistant
(20:06):
store things in. We've taken the time to line the
boxes with this folder type material so that the objects
in the box do not touch the acidic cardboard of
the original box, and they're kind of packaged. Very objects
in here packaged in a sort of a Tetris kind
(20:28):
of way with folders that are marked in catalog. So
in its original form, this stuff would have been just
crammed in it. I wasn't sure what I was expecting
to see in the box. Drawings, notes, makeshift sculptures, old canvases,
(20:49):
the working life of an artist. So this is a
pretty cool on a lenticular of the daisies. Did he
make that or is that just something he bought? That
was probably something he bought. At best he would have
commissioned to be made, But I think this was something
that was purchased and then used as an inspiration for
us later working. And you can smell it, right, do
(21:10):
you do? You smell that? That? That's the object itself
off gassing. The lenticular is one of those pieces of
cardboard with an image on it that's printed in such
a way that it looks like it has three dimensions.
They're big with children. This one had flowers on it.
Sometimes we find like notes like well the Hay's in tent,
(21:32):
like why he was collecting the ice along with the
objects them? You know what we can serve sort of
source material. Yeah, so he's got like six venticular than that. Yeah.
In that top folder, John continued digging deeper. Deeper into
the same box, we found an old movie scrapboard that
(21:54):
once belonged to a fan somewhere, a bunch of eight
by ten glossies of movie stars, card Gable, Bing Crosby,
the seal ball. Do you want to go when more folder? Yeah,
let's do what last last folder would be cool? So here, lads,
we looked at a piece of what seemed like junk
mail an invite to an art opening. So we even
(22:15):
keep the paper clips. Yeah, I see, it's particulous. Yeah, yeah,
everything's got stop. John started whispering. It seemed appropriate. We
were deep in the dragon's lair. Now, why are Andy
(22:41):
Warhol's time capsules full of junk because he collected junk? Well,
if you wanted to meet Andy Warhol, all you have
to do in the eighties was go to the flea market,
the sixth Avenue flea Market. I'm in New York talking
with Simon Dunan writer fashionista. In fact, I just would
(23:01):
searched flea market in the Warholl Diaries and it comes
up about twelve times, because he's always going to coming
from blah blah blah. I've known Simon ever since he
wrote a book called Eccentric Glamour years ago, which included
chapters on Simone de Beauvoir, Tilda Swinton, the supermodel Iman,
and Me, which remains the most preposterously inaccurate but nonetheless
(23:27):
deeply flattering thing anyone has ever written about me. I
love Simon Douna. Anyway, back in the day, Simon knew
Andy Warhol and the flea market where he hung out.
It was a protean flea market kept growing, expanding, retreating
anytime there's a new law available. The flea mark expanded
(23:49):
and it was a significant social scene. Like I remember
seeing Catherine de Neuve there and it was just a
place that you went if you were in New York.
It was a way of you know, checking everybody out
and meeting your friends. We were in Simon's apartment and
impossibly sheet worn of rooms. I could walk you around
(24:10):
and show you many things that Jonathan and I or
I myself bought at the sixth Avenor flea market. That
bust of Michael Jackson, which people think is that Jeff
Coon's was ten bucks at the flea market. Yeah, have
you told Jeff Good Simon Dunnan found treasure at the
(24:31):
flea market. Everyone did, but Warhol treated his treasure a
little differently. When Andy Mohol died, it emerged that he
had not unpacked most of this stuff that he'd gotten
at the flea market. There were these stories, I think
in Vanity Fair about his house packed with shopping bags
(24:51):
that he'd gotten at the flea market. When he bought
his Russell Right china, he collected he collected those cookie
jars famously. He would buy those Toysche chocolates. He was
obsessed with them, but he would chew them and spit
them out, you know, because he was always very concerned
about keeping his trim little figure. So the idea that
(25:15):
he collected these big, sort of rotund cookie jars to
be stuffed with cookies, it's kind of hilarious because he
was sort of, you know, always very conscious of his figure.
Andy Warhol was a hoarder, all the classic symptoms. Simon
Dudon used to head up the window dressing department at Barney's,
(25:36):
and he famously did an homage to Wharel after his
death entitled The Compulsive Collector. We took the mannequin dressed
in jeans, the blue blazer turtleneck, and then I just
went and bought one of those tacky Warhole wigs that
you could get at the Halloween store, put the glasses
on him, and instantly it became Andy, to the point
(25:59):
where Pat Hackett, who wrote the Warhole Diaries, was sort
of you know, skipping down Seventh Avenue and screeched to
a She banged on the window. She said to me,
he had a heart attack. I thought, Andy, come back
from the dead. I can show you the window. Simon
brought out a book filled with pictures of his most
(26:21):
famous windows. Oh, this is fantastic. This is you can see.
It looks just like just like him. And all around
the mannequin was stuff, the exact same kind of stuff
that later found its way into the boxes at the
Warhol Museum. The definition of a collector is someone who
collects objects discriminately, someone who selects and chooses. But as
(26:46):
Simon so nicely put it, Andy Warhol was a compulsive collector.
His collecting was indiscriminate. And what happens when he dies
and his indiscriminate collection passes into the hands of a museum.
They don't edit it or streamline it. They keep it
exactly as it was hidden the way behind locked doors.
(27:09):
The Warhol Museum is an indiscriminate collection of an indiscriminate collection.
The special thing about it, I think is that it
feels like it could be detritus in any other situation, right,
like remains of a day. Like there's you know, the
flight kit you would get on a first class international flight,
like the slippers, the vomit bag, the silver wear from
(27:32):
that international flight, like in one of the time capsules.
So it's it's this like sense of Warhol when you're
with the material. But then again it's it's not you know.
I mean, we even have the box after he died
at the hospital of his clothing and his final effects
that were left at the hospital. We have that box
(27:53):
preserved as it was picked up from the hospital, so
it had his jacket in it that he wore to
the hospital for that final visit. The backpack exactly how
it was packed, so it has like all of his
classes and the business card for his doctor in the
front pocket. Now, I don't mean to pick on the
(28:15):
Warhol Museum. This is what all art museums do. During
his tenure running them at Philippe de Montebello, acquired eighty
four thousand objects, the overwhelming majority of which were packed
away in boxes and sent to storage in New Jersey,
never to be seen again. That's not any different from
(28:35):
the mountain of detritus in cardboard boxes upstairs at the
Warhol Museum. Somewhere in the United States, there are twin brothers.
I don't know precisely where they live, but in a
big city. Can you just describe them? They're not married.
(28:57):
I take it they're not married. The psychologist Randy Frost,
who work closely with them for some time, refers to
them as Alvin and Jerry, both pseudonyms. Born into a
wealthy family, childhood prodigies, rumpled suits in bow ties. These
are two people I really liked intensely. The brothers lived
(29:18):
in adjoining identical penthouse apartments, in a hotel, each with
an eight hundred square foot great room with double height ceilings,
and each brother had filled his great room with things.
I'm quoting now from Frost's account of the case from
a book he co authored called Stuff. Every square foot
(29:39):
of the great room and dining room was packed with
works of art and period furniture, eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings, sculptures,
bus antiques, lamps, jewelry, and more. Ende. They had no
pathways between all of their stuff. You stepped over things
as you walked. Some of the piles were six feet high.
On top of the art were clothes everywhere, and papers,
(30:03):
business cards, bits of junk. They were lovely. They were
intense in what they did. They had this kind of
bonds as twins, but tension at the same time. Fascinating,
fascinating characters and really very interested in this phenomenon for themselves,
(30:26):
this phenomenon meaning hoarding. Frost began to study hoarding behaviors
with the assumption that they sprang from the same place
as obsessive compulsive disorders. But the more he worked with hoarders,
the more he became convinced that description didn't fit OCD.
Behavior is about the catastrophic reaction to an intrusive thought,
(30:48):
and those intrusive thoughts are negative danger, threat, contamination. But
so much of hoarding appeared to be the opposite. It
appeared to be about pleasure. One of the brothers, Alvin,
would come home for lunch nearly every day just to
be among his things, not to organize, but to enjoy.
(31:08):
Frost to go with him on some of those visits,
and Alvin would walk through the chaos, pick up random objects,
and describe the story behind each one of his treasures.
Look at this doctor. His voice rose with excitement as
he found a ring. The ring he thought was from
western India. It was huge, almost the size of a walnut.
(31:29):
To said, seeing the book, when you're walking through Alvin's
apartment with him and he's picking up objects, But many
of those objects have genuine value, many of them did,
some of them didn't, some of them didn't. And it
reminded me a little bit of Andy Warhol, because he
collected things in this way, and things with immense value
(31:52):
and things of no value and put them all into
into these treasure chests. Yeah, yeah, was Alvin aware? He
must have been aware intellectually of what was marketplace valuable
and what was Yes, it just that it was all
a value tea. It was all value to him, yeah yeah,
And he had no desire. He didn't want to show
(32:14):
off his treasures in any mil Frost says that the
impulse to Hoarde has three motivations. It's one is instrumental,
that is, I might need it someday. The other is emotional,
that is, this emotional connection with another person or of
aunt or something. And the third is esthetic, this idea
of the beauty of the physical world. The second of
(32:36):
those ideas, the emotional one, Frost describes as the Proust
effect from the famous passage in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
He's eating this cookie and all of a sudden, it
brings him back to his childhood when his aunt used
to make these cookies for him, and he remembers the
way it felt a little bit like the phenomena is
(32:57):
like hearing a song from your childhood. What started to
dawn on me was that with people with this problem,
these objects form that kind of an experience in a
much more intense way than everybody else. So somehow these
objects are keys to these visceral memories that get produced.
(33:22):
So finding something, anything, some token, some memento, anything that
from your past triggers a much more vivid recollection than
than in the rest of us than for the rest
of us. Yes, and it is a recollection, so hold on.
(33:42):
It's such a fascinating notion. So you mentioned music, so
most of us would have it. You know there are
songs if you play them. Yes, have that thing for me?
Yeas only you. I don't know why that song because
I can imagine. So what you're saying is that feeling
I have with yas only you, only with a book
of match box of matches or absolutely yes, a playbill
(34:05):
or a yes. One of Frost's patients, it was a
woman who couldn't throw away a Disney blanket that her
daughter had loved as a small child, because she feels
like if she throws it away, she will lose the
memories associated with that blanket, and she will lose that
piece of history, her personal history. And if she throws
(34:29):
away too much, there's nothing left of her. For another patient,
it was one of those ATM cash envelopes from five
years ago. There was no cash in, and she spent
the cash that was in it, but on the back
she'd written how she spent it, and it wasn't anything
unusual grocery store drunks or a few other items. She
put it in the recyco box and she started to cry,
(34:52):
and she said, it feels like I'm losing that day
in my life. And if I lose too much, there'll
be nothing left of me. There'll be nothing left of me.
One of the twin brothers, Alvin, was a successful event organizer.
He once told Frost that he had lost a folder
(35:12):
containing his notes from something he'd organized, and even though
the event was recent, every memory he'd had of it
was gone, and when he found the folder again, his
memories returned. If your mind works that way, why would
you ever throw away that folder? Most people would look
at this and see a mess, he told Frost on
(35:34):
one of their visits to his penthouse, And then he said, really,
it's layered and complex. Their penthouses were so overwhelmed with
stuff that they had to live elsewhere in smaller rooms
in the hotel, which were also overwhelmed with stuff. But
they couldn't part with any of it. It would be
too great a loss. They didn't want to itemize it
(35:56):
or put it under balance sheet or show the world.
I'm sure they had their own Islamic rugs buried somewhere
in their great room, which they had never seen when
you got them away from there from the subjective hoarding,
it away from their apartments. Yeah, I mean, what were
(36:18):
they like? Oh, they were they were fun, they were fascinating,
They knew something about everything. They were both delightful, delightful people.
If you talk to a lay person, they would probably
think of hoarding as a kind of mental illness. I'm
imagining it's not an mental illness. It's not a deficit
that affects all aspects of your functioning. Yeah. The way
(36:41):
I describe it sometimes is a form of giftedness. There's
a gift associated with this, an appreciation for the physical world,
an appreciation for the emotional experience that's associated with objects,
and and that that gift unfortunately comes with a curse,
(37:02):
and the curse is not being able to manage it.
The hoarder is someone with the unusual ability to see
beauty in the ordinary, which is exactly the point that
Simon Douna made about Andy Warhol. The nicest aspect of
him was that he was very democratic, example, he said,
if everyone's not a beauty, then nobody is. Oh, that's
(37:26):
kind of lovely, it's fabulous. It's that's why he thought
these these drag queens, you know, Jackie Curtis and Hollywood
Lawn were not objectively Sophia Laurent, but he saw beauty
and magic and madness in them. You know, you know what,
But Simon, that is the perfect illustration of the particular condition,
(37:47):
wonderful condition of the order. Who applies that same logic
to objects. If every object is not is not beautiful,
then no object is right. It's exactly the same like
some crappy old broken toy. It is the same as
an honouveau fars that your grandmother left you. Yeah, exactly.
That's that is the god that's haunting it is, isn't
(38:12):
it haunting? And it's why the Warhol Museum keeps all
of Warhol's boxes, because they have the same condition that
Warhol had. They have to insist on the meaning and
beauty in all of that ephemera. They're the Warhol Museum,
and like the hoarder, they worry that if they get
rid of any of his stuff, they'll lose their connection
(38:33):
to him. And can they count that stuff up and
put a value on it. No, because to the hoarder
everything is of equal value. So you get into these debates.
They get esoteric sometimes, but you know, standard siding. Eventually
(38:53):
the board says, all right, we gotta get to closure.
We got to make a decision. We can't just go
on forever. Ron Bossio My guide to the hearing of
the FSB in nineteen ninety one, when C. Douglas Dillon
appeared in Norwalk, Connecticut and stood up before the Vatican
of Accounting and said, we cannot tell you what we
have in our collections. That is not the way our
(39:14):
imaginations are wired. And the Vatican backs down. The accountants
realize that this is a battle they cannot win, with
the result that on virtually every American art museum bound
sheet there is some version of note A. In conformity
with accounting policies generally followed by art museums, the value
(39:37):
of the museum's collections has been excluded from the statement
of financial position. When the moon was new, and the
sanyang of silver and gold, the gods sang, the green
grass they silver spilled, and the white waters they were
gold filled. In Tolken's poem The Horde. Everyone who desired
(40:01):
the treasure dies in the end, but the treasure remains
buried deep in giant warehouses. In the Jersey. There is
an old Hord in a dark rock. Who've gotten behind doors,
and nun can unlock that grim gate. No man can
pass on. The mound rows, the green grass, their sheep feed,
(40:25):
and the loch saw and the wind blows from the
sea show the Old Hord. The night shall keep while
Earth waits and the elves sleep. Revision's history is produced
by Mielobelle and Leamingiestu, with Jacob Smith, Eloise Litton and
(40:46):
Anna naim Our. Editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by
Louise Gera, mastering by Flawan Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson.
Special thanks to the Pushkin Crew, Heataphane, Carly Migliore, Maya Kanig,
Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell and of course al Hafe, Jacob
(41:08):
Weisberg I, Alcin Diaper
Pushkin. Starting today, if you don't live in New York State,
you're gonna have to pay a mandatory entrance fee to
visit the Metropolitan Museum. Eyewitness News ABC seven, New York,
March first, twenty eighteen. The new policy was announced in January,
but it took effect today. Adults who do not have
(00:37):
ID proving that they live right here in New York
have to pay twenty five dollars. Seniors will pay seventeen dollars.
If I had to pinpoint the beginning of my obsession
with art museums, it would be the moment the Metropolitan Museum,
one of the greatest museums in the world, decided to
impose entrance fees. It was a difficult time for the institution.
(00:59):
They had a forty million dollar deficit. They got rid
of ninety employees, Exhibitions were canceled, there was a shake
up in the leadership. Up and down the Upper East
Side of Manhattan, there was hand ringing and a great
gnashing of teeth. I remember one New York Times headline
from that time, is the met Museum a great institution
(01:21):
in decline. That was followed by one expression of anguish
after another, including this from the former chairman of the
Met's Drawings and Print Department. To have inherited a museum
as strong as the MET was ten years ago, with
a great curatorial staff, and to have it be what
(01:42):
it is today is unimaginable. Well exactly because for the
life of me, I couldn't imagine how it was. The
Met was crying poverty. I mean, they have one of
the largest and most valuable art collections in the world
one point five million objects. What's all that art worth?
(02:02):
I don't know, A hundred billion dollars more. The MET
might be the richest nonprofit institution in human history. All
they would have to do is pick a couple things
off the shelf and they'd never see a deficit again.
This is like Jeff Bezos firing the gardener because he's
out of cash. Just go to the ATM, Jeff. But
(02:23):
they couldn't do it. They would rather fire people and
make a family of four cough up to one hundred
dollars at the gate than even think of parting with
a single one of their possessions. Why it's a puzzle,
And it is for puzzles like this that we have
revisionist history. My name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to
(02:50):
my podcast about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This is our
fifth season, five years of digression, high dudgeon, needless provocation,
and my absolute favorite grand unified theories. In this season
of revisionist History, I want to explore our emotional attachment
(03:10):
to objects and rituals and tradition and the way in
which those attachments portray us. And in this first episode,
I would like to make sense of the strange relationship
of the art world to art. During his thirty one
(03:40):
year tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Philippe de Matabello, the Met's eighth and longest serving director,
guided the acquisition of more than eighty four thousand works
of art. I found this in a video series called
Great Museums, an episode from twenty ten and Acquiring mind
(04:00):
lots of wide angle shots of marble floored galleries and
gilt frame paintings. NPR Susan Stamberg narrates over what sounds
like an orchestra right there on the set. Born in France,
educated at Harvard in nineteen sixty three, Demande Bello brought
a background in European pay The film runs for an hour.
It's about the most famous director of the Met, Philippe
(04:22):
du Montebello, descendant of a noble French family. In particular,
it's about how much stuff Philippe Dumontebello bought during his
thirty one year tenure as head of the Met. Tapestries,
African sculptures, a fabulous premier, an evening gown that's to
die for. He even bought things he didn't want to buy.
Philippe has been an incredible director for supporting the acquisitions
(04:46):
of objects of great quality from across the globe. It
goes on and on about the acquiring, to the point
where you wonder, or at least I wondered, Wait, I
thought you didn't have any money Today, nearly two million objects,
comprising an encyclopedic treasury of world art, are contained in
(05:07):
the Met's growing election. Apparently I was wrong in the numbers.
Not one point five million objects, two million objects. Let
me give you an example, maybe my favorite example of
this weirdness in the art world. It has to do
with a public hearing held in July of nineteen ninety
one at the Financial Accounting Standards Board, better known as
(05:31):
the f a SB. The FASB is the Vatican of
the American accounting profession, and this was one of the
occasional open sessions the FAB holds in order to share
with the broader American public subjects of grave concern to
the accounting universe. The venue was the FASB's Norwalk, Connecticut headquarters.
(05:52):
The subject accounting for contributions received and contributions made, and
capitalization of works of art, historical treasures, and similar assets.
The room was packed. They videotaped the proceedings so people
could watch in the overflow room. I've read a transcript
of the hearing, all nine hundred and forty seven pages
(06:13):
of it, and I would like to direct your attention
to a particular exchange. It was between the then chairman
of the f a s B, Dennis Beresford, and a
man named C. Douglas Dillon. Dillon was a tall man,
gray suit patrician a certain stature. He was former director
(06:35):
of Dillon, Read and Coe, the Wall Street firm founded
by his father, and was possessed of maybe the greatest
resume in mid century America. US Treasury Secretary from much
of the nineteen sixties, Ambassador to France, chair of the
Brookings Foundation, president of the Harvard Board of Overseers, a
close friend of John Rockefeller the third, a world class
(06:57):
collector of Impressionist art, and, most relevant for the purposes
of the hearing that day, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York City. The American Establishment sent
its biggest gun to confront the FASB over the agency's
proposal to change the rules surrounding the accounting for contributions
(07:20):
received and contributions made, and capitalization of works of art,
historical treasures, and similar assets. The accountants wanted the art
world to follow the same accounting rules as other businesses.
Dylan versus Dennis Beresford, chairman of the FASB, member of
the American Accounting Hall of Fame and the Financial Executive's
(07:42):
International Hall of Fame. Way back on day one of
the proceedings in question, Beresford had made it plain that
he wasn't going to stand for any nonsense. So C.
Douglas Dillon was restrained in his objections. Gracious, I'm going
to guess this was his first visit to Norwalk, Connecticut.
The room must have been hushed, right, I mean, it's C.
(08:05):
Douglas freaking Dillon. He does a little preamble, carefully explains
how outraged the MET is at the intrusion of accountants
into their business, launches into a vivid description of the
extraordinary size of the met's collection. And then, and this
is maybe my favorite part of the entire nine hundred
and forty seven page transcript, Dilan says, quote, we have
(08:29):
a new curator of Islamic art, been with us for
a couple of years now. We have certainly the greatest
collection of Islamic rugs in the Western Hemisphere, one of
the two or three in the world. He has never
been able to even see that collection because so much
of it is in storage and is so difficult to
(08:50):
get out, so costly and time consuming. That he knows
by the records what they are, but he hasn't been
able to look at them. C. Douglas Dillon is speaking
to an audience of accountants. Accountants are people who like
to count things. More than that, they are people who believe,
(09:11):
as a matter of deep professional principle, that everything can
be counted. And they have proposed that the art world
agree to start counting things like everyone else. And in response,
this pillar of the American Establishment shows up in suburban
Connecticut and says, we can't count our things. There's just
(09:31):
too many of them. They're all buried somewhere in storage.
To give you an example, the guy who was responsible
for Islamic rug collection, maybe the greatest Islamic rug collection
in the world, mind you, has never even seen our
Islamic rug collection. I have to say, this is where
the art world loses me. So I called up the
(09:55):
staffer at the FSB who organized that hearing all those
long years ago. His name is Ron Bassio. Just retired.
This is a good exercise for a seventy three year
old to test the memory to go back. Yes, I'm
very I'm very impressed. Basio returned to his old offices
at FASB headquarters to take my call so he would
(10:18):
have access to the critical documents. So I'm just going
to pull up the financial statements of the Metropolitan Museum
and I want to just want to very briefly walk through.
I was just I was just wondering if that could
be googled up here as well. Yeah, he's on his computer,
I'm on mine. We're downloading the Metropolitan Museum of Arts
(10:40):
twenty nineteen annual report and locating the crucial part the
statements of financial position. Beginning on page forty four, I
have cash receivable for investments sold retail inventories. These are
all straightforward accounts receivable, straightforward contributions receivable, and thanks the pledges.
(11:04):
Financial statements for almost any organization look pretty much the same.
You start by listing your assets, everything of value. Then
you list your liabilities loans, mortgages, pension obligations. Then you
balance them. That's why it's called a balance sheet. Bassio
and I are going down the list of the METS assets.
Then there's investments, which I'm assuming is the endowment. Could
(11:28):
be endowment or it could be just investments in total.
They may not all be part of the endowment. Then
I have fixed assets three hundred and ninety three million,
and then I have collections and I have nothing. It's
supposed to be a precise accounting of everything the MET
has of value, the amount the museum made last year
(11:49):
from selling stocks, the amount of cash it has on
hand its endowment, the amount it's owed from various creditors,
the amount it god in gifts and donations, even the
value of the inventory in its gift shop everything, and
they add it all up and they come up with
a number total assets. But next to the line item
(12:10):
entitled collections, that is to say, the millions of unimaginably
rare and precious art objects owned by the museum, the
eighteen van goes, the forty six Picassos, the twenty Rembrandts.
There is no dollar figure, nothing, It's blank. All it
says is c note A. Okay ah here it is
(12:32):
note A. In the appendix it says, in conformity with
accounting policies generally followed by art museums, the value of
the museum's collections has been excluded from the statement of
financial position. Excluded. This is a multi billion dollar organization
(12:53):
with billions and billions of dollars in art, and it's
none of it is listed on their in the financial statement.
It seems I don't I don't even understand how that
style that was Your reaction is similar to the reaction
that some of our board members had. On top of that,
it turns out that the met would rather charge admission,
(13:15):
cut exhibitions, and get rid of ninety people than sell anything,
even though they have so many things like Islamic rugs,
that the guy running the Islamic rug collection hasn't even
seen any of Islamic rugs because they're all in storage somewhere.
In fact, most of the met's collection is in storage,
huge football field sized warehouses, presumably somewhere in New Jersey,
(13:39):
full of stuff. And when the FASB says, why don't
you tell us, like a normal institution, just how much
your stuff is worth? Because I don't know. Maybe it
would be easier to think rationally about how to run
things if you knew that fact, the MET goes crazy,
dispatches c Douglas Dillon to Norwa, Connecticut to say never,
(14:00):
not on my watch. We've never done that and we
never will. Yeah, this is unlike any other business. You're
supposed to carry assets at either book or market value,
and you're supposed to put them in your financial reports,
and they don't. This is Michael O'Hare, who teaches in
(14:22):
the Business School at Berkeley. If you ask anyone, anyone
who knows their way around a balance sheet about the
way museums record their assets, you get the Michael O'Hare response.
I was talking about this at some conference and somebody
from an orchestra, some financial person from an orchestra said,
wait a minute, you mean you buy a painting and
(14:43):
then it just disappears. And that's what happens. There's an
expense and then that's the last we hear about it
in the financial records. It's quite it's quite bizarre. For
the longest time, I would bore everyone I met with
how strange I found all this until one day I
was in Holland on my book tour. In Leiden, out
(15:04):
with a bunch of people in a bar, and I
told the group the story of the epic showdown between
Dennis Beresford and C. Douglas Dillon, and this one guy,
a philosopher, said, Oh, it's like Smog. Smog, the dragon
from the Hobbit who sits on a mountain of treasure.
Smog doesn't want to use his gold, he doesn't wear
(15:25):
it out to dragon social events. He does not list
his holdings on his annual dragon financial statement. He just
wants to hoard it. And I'm like, oh, my god, Smog, Yes,
that explains everything. Was an old dragon and a gray stone.
(15:46):
His red eyes blinked as he lay alone. His joy
was dead and his youth spent. He was knobbed and wrinkled,
and his limbs bent in the long years to his
gold Jane, his heart furnished the fired way. This is J. R. R.
Tolkien reading his poem The Horde to his belly's slime
(16:08):
gem stuck child and Goldie with snuff and lick to
his bellies slime gems stuck thick. That's what happens when
a dragon sits on his treasure for too long, and
the stuff that couldn't fit under his belly the dragon
has buried deep inside his lair in storage. Following that
(16:46):
epiphany in the bar in Leiden, I resolved to perform
a field test of the hypothesis that art museums are
modern day versions of the dragon's smog. This was a
few months back. I was going to be in Pittsburgh
for another reason anyway, so I decided to pay a
visit to the Andy Warhol Museum, the largest museum devoted
(17:07):
to a single artist in North America. So I made
an appointment with the museum's curator of art, Jessica Beck,
and on a bright and cold morning in Pittsburgh, I
headed out to the city's North Shore neighborhood to the
beautiful Old Warehouse that holds the museum. I told Beck
I didn't want to see just the collection, the art
on the walls. I wanted to see everything. So Beck
(17:31):
graciously took me upstairs to the archives. We're just off
the staircase. There were dozens of brown cardboard boxes stacked
in neat piles. Oh I see. Oh they're like they're
covered in the plastic and you know, capped behind glass. Yeah,
(17:52):
so this again is just a portion of the murder
whole mother. Yeah, how many are here? The cardboard boxes?
How's what Warhol called his time capsules. There are six
hundred and ten of them in total. He would put
things in these cardboard box boxes, tape them shut, and
set them aside. But he also had other boxes, idea
(18:14):
boxes what are called basement boxes. After Warhol died, everything
was shipped to Pittsburgh in an armada of tractor trailers.
The museum's best guests is in their archive. They have
at least five hundred thousand objects. And so all the
other boxes are behind our door. Yeah, the rest of
them are back there. Yeah, but it's not it's not
(18:35):
something I can see that I'm not sure, and I
can ask, we can find out because I wasn't sure.
We found one of Warhol's time capsules that had been opened.
It was on the counter like a patient, eitherized upon
a table. We peered inside. So this is his fifties suits,
nineteen fifty six, Hong Kong, so his first trip to Asia.
(18:59):
A lot of them are closed right now because we're
sort of trying to figure out how to keep the
objects from shifting. I was suddenly curious. I wanted to
see inside one of the clothes boxes. Beck said she
didn't have the authority to open one up, but she
made a few calls. Finally she found someone. Oh, okay,
we have something. Okay, that's take a look. Another of
(19:23):
the museum's staff hurried towards us. This is John, So
we're just going to peek into one, just to get
a sense of I was splaining, you know that a
lot of things are unfolders, but um, so they're they're heavy. Yeah, yeah,
they're you know, like way forty or fifty pounds in
(19:43):
some cases. John positioned himself in front of the box
and began opening it up. His movements were assured, practiced. So, yeah,
we treat the media box itself like it's part of
an object, So that's why were the gloves. So these
would have been boxes that Andy would have this assistant
(20:06):
store things in. We've taken the time to line the
boxes with this folder type material so that the objects
in the box do not touch the acidic cardboard of
the original box, and they're kind of packaged. Very objects
in here packaged in a sort of a Tetris kind
(20:28):
of way with folders that are marked in catalog. So
in its original form, this stuff would have been just
crammed in it. I wasn't sure what I was expecting
to see in the box. Drawings, notes, makeshift sculptures, old canvases,
(20:49):
the working life of an artist. So this is a
pretty cool on a lenticular of the daisies. Did he
make that or is that just something he bought? That
was probably something he bought. At best he would have
commissioned to be made, But I think this was something
that was purchased and then used as an inspiration for
us later working. And you can smell it, right, do
(21:10):
you do? You smell that? That? That's the object itself
off gassing. The lenticular is one of those pieces of
cardboard with an image on it that's printed in such
a way that it looks like it has three dimensions.
They're big with children. This one had flowers on it.
Sometimes we find like notes like well the Hay's in tent,
(21:32):
like why he was collecting the ice along with the
objects them? You know what we can serve sort of
source material. Yeah, so he's got like six venticular than that. Yeah.
In that top folder, John continued digging deeper. Deeper into
the same box, we found an old movie scrapboard that
(21:54):
once belonged to a fan somewhere, a bunch of eight
by ten glossies of movie stars, card Gable, Bing Crosby,
the seal ball. Do you want to go when more folder? Yeah,
let's do what last last folder would be cool? So here, lads,
we looked at a piece of what seemed like junk
mail an invite to an art opening. So we even
(22:15):
keep the paper clips. Yeah, I see, it's particulous. Yeah, yeah,
everything's got stop. John started whispering. It seemed appropriate. We
were deep in the dragon's lair. Now, why are Andy
(22:41):
Warhol's time capsules full of junk because he collected junk? Well,
if you wanted to meet Andy Warhol, all you have
to do in the eighties was go to the flea market,
the sixth Avenue flea Market. I'm in New York talking
with Simon Dunan writer fashionista. In fact, I just would
(23:01):
searched flea market in the Warholl Diaries and it comes
up about twelve times, because he's always going to coming
from blah blah blah. I've known Simon ever since he
wrote a book called Eccentric Glamour years ago, which included
chapters on Simone de Beauvoir, Tilda Swinton, the supermodel Iman,
and Me, which remains the most preposterously inaccurate but nonetheless
(23:27):
deeply flattering thing anyone has ever written about me. I
love Simon Douna. Anyway, back in the day, Simon knew
Andy Warhol and the flea market where he hung out.
It was a protean flea market kept growing, expanding, retreating
anytime there's a new law available. The flea mark expanded
(23:49):
and it was a significant social scene. Like I remember
seeing Catherine de Neuve there and it was just a
place that you went if you were in New York.
It was a way of you know, checking everybody out
and meeting your friends. We were in Simon's apartment and
impossibly sheet worn of rooms. I could walk you around
(24:10):
and show you many things that Jonathan and I or
I myself bought at the sixth Avenor flea market. That
bust of Michael Jackson, which people think is that Jeff
Coon's was ten bucks at the flea market. Yeah, have
you told Jeff Good Simon Dunnan found treasure at the
(24:31):
flea market. Everyone did, but Warhol treated his treasure a
little differently. When Andy Mohol died, it emerged that he
had not unpacked most of this stuff that he'd gotten
at the flea market. There were these stories, I think
in Vanity Fair about his house packed with shopping bags
(24:51):
that he'd gotten at the flea market. When he bought
his Russell Right china, he collected he collected those cookie
jars famously. He would buy those Toysche chocolates. He was
obsessed with them, but he would chew them and spit
them out, you know, because he was always very concerned
about keeping his trim little figure. So the idea that
(25:15):
he collected these big, sort of rotund cookie jars to
be stuffed with cookies, it's kind of hilarious because he
was sort of, you know, always very conscious of his figure.
Andy Warhol was a hoarder, all the classic symptoms. Simon
Dudon used to head up the window dressing department at Barney's,
(25:36):
and he famously did an homage to Wharel after his
death entitled The Compulsive Collector. We took the mannequin dressed
in jeans, the blue blazer turtleneck, and then I just
went and bought one of those tacky Warhole wigs that
you could get at the Halloween store, put the glasses
on him, and instantly it became Andy, to the point
(25:59):
where Pat Hackett, who wrote the Warhole Diaries, was sort
of you know, skipping down Seventh Avenue and screeched to
a She banged on the window. She said to me,
he had a heart attack. I thought, Andy, come back
from the dead. I can show you the window. Simon
brought out a book filled with pictures of his most
(26:21):
famous windows. Oh, this is fantastic. This is you can see.
It looks just like just like him. And all around
the mannequin was stuff, the exact same kind of stuff
that later found its way into the boxes at the
Warhol Museum. The definition of a collector is someone who
collects objects discriminately, someone who selects and chooses. But as
(26:46):
Simon so nicely put it, Andy Warhol was a compulsive collector.
His collecting was indiscriminate. And what happens when he dies
and his indiscriminate collection passes into the hands of a museum.
They don't edit it or streamline it. They keep it
exactly as it was hidden the way behind locked doors.
(27:09):
The Warhol Museum is an indiscriminate collection of an indiscriminate collection.
The special thing about it, I think is that it
feels like it could be detritus in any other situation, right,
like remains of a day. Like there's you know, the
flight kit you would get on a first class international flight,
like the slippers, the vomit bag, the silver wear from
(27:32):
that international flight, like in one of the time capsules.
So it's it's this like sense of Warhol when you're
with the material. But then again it's it's not you know.
I mean, we even have the box after he died
at the hospital of his clothing and his final effects
that were left at the hospital. We have that box
(27:53):
preserved as it was picked up from the hospital, so
it had his jacket in it that he wore to
the hospital for that final visit. The backpack exactly how
it was packed, so it has like all of his
classes and the business card for his doctor in the
front pocket. Now, I don't mean to pick on the
(28:15):
Warhol Museum. This is what all art museums do. During
his tenure running them at Philippe de Montebello, acquired eighty
four thousand objects, the overwhelming majority of which were packed
away in boxes and sent to storage in New Jersey,
never to be seen again. That's not any different from
(28:35):
the mountain of detritus in cardboard boxes upstairs at the
Warhol Museum. Somewhere in the United States, there are twin brothers.
I don't know precisely where they live, but in a
big city. Can you just describe them? They're not married.
(28:57):
I take it they're not married. The psychologist Randy Frost,
who work closely with them for some time, refers to
them as Alvin and Jerry, both pseudonyms. Born into a
wealthy family, childhood prodigies, rumpled suits in bow ties. These
are two people I really liked intensely. The brothers lived
(29:18):
in adjoining identical penthouse apartments, in a hotel, each with
an eight hundred square foot great room with double height ceilings,
and each brother had filled his great room with things.
I'm quoting now from Frost's account of the case from
a book he co authored called Stuff. Every square foot
(29:39):
of the great room and dining room was packed with
works of art and period furniture, eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings, sculptures,
bus antiques, lamps, jewelry, and more. Ende. They had no
pathways between all of their stuff. You stepped over things
as you walked. Some of the piles were six feet high.
On top of the art were clothes everywhere, and papers,
(30:03):
business cards, bits of junk. They were lovely. They were
intense in what they did. They had this kind of
bonds as twins, but tension at the same time. Fascinating,
fascinating characters and really very interested in this phenomenon for themselves,
(30:26):
this phenomenon meaning hoarding. Frost began to study hoarding behaviors
with the assumption that they sprang from the same place
as obsessive compulsive disorders. But the more he worked with hoarders,
the more he became convinced that description didn't fit OCD.
Behavior is about the catastrophic reaction to an intrusive thought,
(30:48):
and those intrusive thoughts are negative danger, threat, contamination. But
so much of hoarding appeared to be the opposite. It
appeared to be about pleasure. One of the brothers, Alvin,
would come home for lunch nearly every day just to
be among his things, not to organize, but to enjoy.
(31:08):
Frost to go with him on some of those visits,
and Alvin would walk through the chaos, pick up random objects,
and describe the story behind each one of his treasures.
Look at this doctor. His voice rose with excitement as
he found a ring. The ring he thought was from
western India. It was huge, almost the size of a walnut.
(31:29):
To said, seeing the book, when you're walking through Alvin's
apartment with him and he's picking up objects, But many
of those objects have genuine value, many of them did,
some of them didn't, some of them didn't. And it
reminded me a little bit of Andy Warhol, because he
collected things in this way, and things with immense value
(31:52):
and things of no value and put them all into
into these treasure chests. Yeah, yeah, was Alvin aware? He
must have been aware intellectually of what was marketplace valuable
and what was Yes, it just that it was all
a value tea. It was all value to him, yeah yeah,
And he had no desire. He didn't want to show
(32:14):
off his treasures in any mil Frost says that the
impulse to Hoarde has three motivations. It's one is instrumental,
that is, I might need it someday. The other is emotional,
that is, this emotional connection with another person or of
aunt or something. And the third is esthetic, this idea
of the beauty of the physical world. The second of
(32:36):
those ideas, the emotional one, Frost describes as the Proust
effect from the famous passage in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
He's eating this cookie and all of a sudden, it
brings him back to his childhood when his aunt used
to make these cookies for him, and he remembers the
way it felt a little bit like the phenomena is
(32:57):
like hearing a song from your childhood. What started to
dawn on me was that with people with this problem,
these objects form that kind of an experience in a
much more intense way than everybody else. So somehow these
objects are keys to these visceral memories that get produced.
(33:22):
So finding something, anything, some token, some memento, anything that
from your past triggers a much more vivid recollection than
than in the rest of us than for the rest
of us. Yes, and it is a recollection, so hold on.
(33:42):
It's such a fascinating notion. So you mentioned music, so
most of us would have it. You know there are
songs if you play them. Yes, have that thing for me?
Yeas only you. I don't know why that song because
I can imagine. So what you're saying is that feeling
I have with yas only you, only with a book
of match box of matches or absolutely yes, a playbill
(34:05):
or a yes. One of Frost's patients, it was a
woman who couldn't throw away a Disney blanket that her
daughter had loved as a small child, because she feels
like if she throws it away, she will lose the
memories associated with that blanket, and she will lose that
piece of history, her personal history. And if she throws
(34:29):
away too much, there's nothing left of her. For another patient,
it was one of those ATM cash envelopes from five
years ago. There was no cash in, and she spent
the cash that was in it, but on the back
she'd written how she spent it, and it wasn't anything
unusual grocery store drunks or a few other items. She
put it in the recyco box and she started to cry,
(34:52):
and she said, it feels like I'm losing that day
in my life. And if I lose too much, there'll
be nothing left of me. There'll be nothing left of me.
One of the twin brothers, Alvin, was a successful event organizer.
He once told Frost that he had lost a folder
(35:12):
containing his notes from something he'd organized, and even though
the event was recent, every memory he'd had of it
was gone, and when he found the folder again, his
memories returned. If your mind works that way, why would
you ever throw away that folder? Most people would look
at this and see a mess, he told Frost on
(35:34):
one of their visits to his penthouse, And then he said, really,
it's layered and complex. Their penthouses were so overwhelmed with
stuff that they had to live elsewhere in smaller rooms
in the hotel, which were also overwhelmed with stuff. But
they couldn't part with any of it. It would be
too great a loss. They didn't want to itemize it
(35:56):
or put it under balance sheet or show the world.
I'm sure they had their own Islamic rugs buried somewhere
in their great room, which they had never seen when
you got them away from there from the subjective hoarding,
it away from their apartments. Yeah, I mean, what were
(36:18):
they like? Oh, they were they were fun, they were fascinating,
They knew something about everything. They were both delightful, delightful people.
If you talk to a lay person, they would probably
think of hoarding as a kind of mental illness. I'm
imagining it's not an mental illness. It's not a deficit
that affects all aspects of your functioning. Yeah. The way
(36:41):
I describe it sometimes is a form of giftedness. There's
a gift associated with this, an appreciation for the physical world,
an appreciation for the emotional experience that's associated with objects,
and and that that gift unfortunately comes with a curse,
(37:02):
and the curse is not being able to manage it.
The hoarder is someone with the unusual ability to see
beauty in the ordinary, which is exactly the point that
Simon Douna made about Andy Warhol. The nicest aspect of
him was that he was very democratic, example, he said,
if everyone's not a beauty, then nobody is. Oh, that's
(37:26):
kind of lovely, it's fabulous. It's that's why he thought
these these drag queens, you know, Jackie Curtis and Hollywood
Lawn were not objectively Sophia Laurent, but he saw beauty
and magic and madness in them. You know, you know what,
But Simon, that is the perfect illustration of the particular condition,
(37:47):
wonderful condition of the order. Who applies that same logic
to objects. If every object is not is not beautiful,
then no object is right. It's exactly the same like
some crappy old broken toy. It is the same as
an honouveau fars that your grandmother left you. Yeah, exactly.
That's that is the god that's haunting it is, isn't
(38:12):
it haunting? And it's why the Warhol Museum keeps all
of Warhol's boxes, because they have the same condition that
Warhol had. They have to insist on the meaning and
beauty in all of that ephemera. They're the Warhol Museum,
and like the hoarder, they worry that if they get
rid of any of his stuff, they'll lose their connection
(38:33):
to him. And can they count that stuff up and
put a value on it. No, because to the hoarder
everything is of equal value. So you get into these debates.
They get esoteric sometimes, but you know, standard siding. Eventually
(38:53):
the board says, all right, we gotta get to closure.
We got to make a decision. We can't just go
on forever. Ron Bossio My guide to the hearing of
the FSB in nineteen ninety one, when C. Douglas Dillon
appeared in Norwalk, Connecticut and stood up before the Vatican
of Accounting and said, we cannot tell you what we
have in our collections. That is not the way our
(39:14):
imaginations are wired. And the Vatican backs down. The accountants
realize that this is a battle they cannot win, with
the result that on virtually every American art museum bound
sheet there is some version of note A. In conformity
with accounting policies generally followed by art museums, the value
(39:37):
of the museum's collections has been excluded from the statement
of financial position. When the moon was new, and the
sanyang of silver and gold, the gods sang, the green
grass they silver spilled, and the white waters they were
gold filled. In Tolken's poem The Horde. Everyone who desired
(40:01):
the treasure dies in the end, but the treasure remains
buried deep in giant warehouses. In the Jersey. There is
an old Hord in a dark rock. Who've gotten behind doors,
and nun can unlock that grim gate. No man can
pass on. The mound rows, the green grass, their sheep feed,
(40:25):
and the loch saw and the wind blows from the
sea show the Old Hord. The night shall keep while
Earth waits and the elves sleep. Revision's history is produced
by Mielobelle and Leamingiestu, with Jacob Smith, Eloise Litton and
(40:46):
Anna naim Our. Editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by
Louise Gera, mastering by Flawan Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson.
Special thanks to the Pushkin Crew, Heataphane, Carly Migliore, Maya Kanig,
Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell and of course al Hafe, Jacob
(41:08):
Weisberg I, Alcin Diaper
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!