Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Starting today, if you don't live in New York State,
Speaker 2: you're gonna have to pay a mandatory entrance fee to
Speaker 2: visit the Metropolitan Museum.
Speaker 3: Eyewitness News ABC seven, New York, March first, twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: The new policy was announced in January, but it took
Speaker 2: effect today. Adults who do not have ID proving that
Speaker 2: they live right here in New York have to pay
Speaker 2: twenty five dollars. Seniors will pay seventeen dollars.
Speaker 3: If I had to pinpoint the beginning of my obsession
Speaker 3: with art museums, it would be the moment the Metropolitan Museum,
Speaker 3: one of the greatest museums in the world, decided to
Speaker 3: impose entrance fees. It was a difficult time for the institution.
Speaker 3: They had a forty million dollar deficit. They got rid
Speaker 3: of ninety employees, Exhibitions were canceled, there was a shakeup
Speaker 3: in the leadership. Up and down the Upper East Side
Speaker 3: of Manhattan, there was hand ringing and a great gnashing
Speaker 3: of teeth. I remember one New York Times headline from
Speaker 3: that time, is the met Museum a great institution in decline.
Speaker 3: That was followed by one expression of anguish after another,
Speaker 3: including this from the former chairman of the METS Drawings
Speaker 3: and Print Department. To have inherited a museum as strong
Speaker 3: as the MET was ten years ago, with a great
Speaker 3: curatorial staff, and to have it be what it is
Speaker 3: today is unimaginable. Well exactly because for the life of me,
Speaker 3: I couldn't imagine how it was. The MET was crying poverty.
Speaker 3: I mean, they have one of the largest and most
Speaker 3: valuable art collections in the world one point five million objects.
Speaker 3: What's all that art worth? I don't know, one hundred
Speaker 3: billion dollars more. The MET might be the richest non
Speaker 3: profit institution in human history. All they would have to
Speaker 3: do is pick a couple things off the shelf and
Speaker 3: then never see a deficit again. This is like Jeff
Speaker 3: Bezos firing the gardener because he's out of cash. Just
Speaker 3: go to the ATM, Jeff. But they couldn't do it.
Speaker 3: They would rather fire people and make a family of
Speaker 3: four cough up to one hundred dollars at the gate
Speaker 3: than even think of parting with a single one of
Speaker 3: their possessions. Why it's a puzzle, And it is for
Speaker 3: puzzles like this that we have revisionist history. My name
Speaker 3: is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to my podcast about Things
Speaker 3: Overlooked and Misunderstood. This is our fifth season, five years
Speaker 3: of digression, high dudgeon, needless provocation, and my absolute favorite
Speaker 3: grand unified theories. In this season of Revision's History, I
Speaker 3: want to explore or our emotional attachment to objects and
Speaker 3: rituals and tradition and the way in which those attachments
Speaker 3: betray us. And in this first episode, I would like
Speaker 3: to make sense of the strange relationship of the art
Speaker 3: world to art.
Speaker 4: During his thirty one year tenure as director of the
Speaker 4: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, the mets eighth
Speaker 4: and longest serving director, guided the acquisition of more than
Speaker 4: eighty four thousand works of art.
Speaker 3: I found this in a video series called Great Museums.
Speaker 3: An episode from twenty ten, An Acquiring Mind, lots of
Speaker 3: wide angle shots of marble floored galleries in guilt frame paintings.
Speaker 3: NPR Susan Stamberg narrates over what sounds like an orchestra
Speaker 3: right there on the set.
Speaker 4: Born in France, educated at Harvard in nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 4: de monte Bello brought a background in European page.
Speaker 3: The film runs for an hour. It's about the most
Speaker 3: famous director of the Met, Philippe de Montebello, descendant of
Speaker 3: a noble French family. In particular, it's about how much
Speaker 3: stuff Philippe de Montebello bought during his thirty one year
Speaker 3: tenure as head of the Met. Tapestries, African sculptures, a
Speaker 3: fabulous premiere, an evening gown that's to die for. He
Speaker 3: even bought things he didn't want to buy.
Speaker 2: Philippe has been an incredible director for supporting the acquisitions
Speaker 2: of objects of great quality from across the globe.
Speaker 3: It goes on and on about the acquiring, to the
Speaker 3: point where you wonder, or at least I wondered, Wait,
Speaker 3: I thought you didn't have any money.
Speaker 4: Today, nearly two million objects, comprising an encyclopedic treasury of
Speaker 4: world art are contained in the Met's growing color.
Speaker 3: Apparently I was wrong in the numbers. Not one point
Speaker 3: five million objects, two million objects. Let me give you
Speaker 3: an example, maybe my favorite example of this weirdness in
Speaker 3: the art world. It has to do with a public
Speaker 3: hearing held in July of nineteen ninety one at the
Speaker 3: Financial Accounting Standards Board Better known as the FASB. The
Speaker 3: FASB is the Vatican of the American accounting profession, and
Speaker 3: this was one of the occasional open sessions the FASB
Speaker 3: holds in order to share with the broader American public
Speaker 3: subjects of grave concern to the accounting universe. The venue
Speaker 3: was the FASB's Norwalk, Connecticut headquarters. The subject accounting for
Speaker 3: contributions received and contributions made, and capitalization of works of art,
Speaker 3: historical treasures, and similar assets.
Speaker 1: The room was packed.
Speaker 3: They videotaped the proceedings so people could watch in the
Speaker 3: overflow room. I've read a transcript of the hearing, all
Speaker 3: nine hundred and forty seven pages of it, and I
Speaker 3: would like to direct your attention to a particular exchange.
Speaker 3: It was between the then chairman of the FASB, Dennis Beresford,
Speaker 3: and a man named C. Douglas Dylan. Dylan was a
Speaker 3: tall man, gray suit patrician a certain stature. He was
Speaker 3: former director of Dylan Red and Co. The Wall Street
Speaker 3: firm founded by his father, and was possessed of maybe
Speaker 3: the greatest resume in mid century America. U S Treasury
Speaker 3: Secretary for much of the nineteen sixties, Ambassador to France,
Speaker 3: chair of the Brookings Foundation, President of the Harvard Board
Speaker 3: of Overseers, a close friend of John Rockefeller the third,
Speaker 3: a world class collector of Impressionist art, and, most relevant
Speaker 3: for the purposes of the hearing that day, chairman of
Speaker 3: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The
Speaker 3: American Establishment sent its biggest gun to confront the FASB
Speaker 3: over the agency's proposal to change the rules surrounding the
Speaker 3: accounting for contributions received and contributions made, and capitalization of
Speaker 3: works of art, historical treasures, and similar assets. The accountants
Speaker 3: wanted the art world to follow the same accounting rules
Speaker 3: as other businesses. Dylan versus Dennis Beresford, chairman of the FASB,
Speaker 3: member of the American Accounting Hall of Fame and the
Speaker 3: Financial Executive's International Hall of Fame. Way back on day
Speaker 3: one of the proceedings in question, Beresford had made a
Speaker 3: plane that he wasn't going to stand for any nonsense.
Speaker 1: So C.
Speaker 3: Douglas Dillon was restrained in his objections. Gracious, I'm going
Speaker 3: to guess this was his first visit to Norwalk, Connecticut.
Speaker 3: The room must have been hushed right. I mean, it's C.
Speaker 3: Douglas freaking Dylan. He does a little preamble careful explains
Speaker 3: how outraged the MET is at the intrusion of accountants
Speaker 3: into their business, launches into a vivid description of the
Speaker 3: extraordinary size of the METS collection. And then, and this
Speaker 3: is maybe my favorite part of the entire nine hundred
Speaker 3: and forty seven page transcript, Dylan says, quote, we have
Speaker 3: a new curator of Islamic art, been with us for
Speaker 3: a couple years now. We have certainly the greatest collection
Speaker 3: of Islamic rugs in the Western Hemisphere, one of the
Speaker 3: two or three in the world. He has never been
Speaker 3: able to even see that collection because so much of
Speaker 3: it is in storage and is so difficult to get out,
Speaker 3: so costly and time consuming. That he knows by the
Speaker 3: records what they are, but he hasn't been able to
Speaker 3: look at them. C. Douglas Dillon is speaking to an
Speaker 3: audience of accountants. Accountants are people who like to count things.
Speaker 3: More than that, they are people who believe, as a
Speaker 3: matter of deep professional principle, that everything can be counted.
Speaker 3: And they have proposed that the art world agreed to
Speaker 3: start counting things like everyone else, and in response, this
Speaker 3: pillar of the American establishment shows up in suburban Connecticut
Speaker 3: and says, we can't count our things. There's just too
Speaker 3: many of them. They're all buried somewhere in storage. To
Speaker 3: give you an example, the guy who was responsible for
Speaker 3: our Islamic rug collection, maybe the greatest Islamic rug collection
Speaker 3: in the world. Mind you, has never even seen our
Speaker 3: Islamic rug collection. I have to say, this is where
Speaker 3: the art world loses me. So I called up the
Speaker 3: staffer at the FSB who organized that hearing all those
Speaker 3: long years ago. His name is Ron Bassio.
Speaker 1: Just retired.
Speaker 5: This is a good exercise for a seventy three year
Speaker 5: old to test the memory to go back.
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm very impressed.
Speaker 3: Bossio returned to his old offices at FASB headquarters to
Speaker 3: take my call so he would have access to the
Speaker 3: critical documents. So I'm just going to pull up the
Speaker 3: financial statements of the Metropolitan Museum and I want to
Speaker 3: just want to very briefly walk through.
Speaker 5: I was just wondering if they could be googled up
Speaker 5: here as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's on his computer, I'm online. We're downloading the
Speaker 3: Metropolitan Museum of Arts twenty nineteen annual report and locating
Speaker 3: the crucial part the statements of financial position. Beginning on
Speaker 3: page forty four, I have cash receivable for investments sold
Speaker 3: retail inventories. These are all straightforward accounts receivable, straightforward contributions
Speaker 3: receivable and makes the pledges. Financial statements for almost any
Speaker 3: organization look pretty much the same. You start by listing
Speaker 3: your assets, everything of value. Then you list your liabilities loans, mortgages,
Speaker 3: pension obligations. Then you balance them. That's why it's called
Speaker 3: a balance sheet. Bossio and I are going down the
Speaker 3: list of the METS assets. Then there's investments, which I'm
Speaker 3: assuming is the endowment three point se could.
Speaker 5: Be endowment, or it could be just investments in total.
Speaker 5: They may not all be part of the endowment.
Speaker 3: Then I have fixed assets three hundred and ninety three million,
Speaker 3: and then I have collections.
Speaker 1: And I have nothing.
Speaker 3: It's supposed to be a precise accounting of everything that
Speaker 3: MET has of value, the amount the museum made last
Speaker 3: year from selling stocks, the amount of cash it has
Speaker 3: on hand, it's endowment, the amount is owed from various creditors,
Speaker 3: the amount of god in gifts and donations, even the
Speaker 3: value of the inventory in its gift shop, everything, and
Speaker 3: they add it all up, and they come up with
Speaker 3: a number total assets next to the line item entitled collections,
Speaker 3: that is to say, the millions of unimaginably rare and
Speaker 3: precious art objects owned by the museum. The eighteen van goes,
Speaker 3: the forty six Picassos, the twenty Rembrandts. There is no
Speaker 3: dollar figure, nothing, It's blank. All it says is see
Speaker 3: note A. Okay, ah here it is note A in
Speaker 3: the appendix. It says, in conformity with accounting policies generally
Speaker 3: followed by art museums, the value of the museum's collections
Speaker 3: has been excluded from the statement of financial position.
Speaker 1: Excluded. This is a.
Speaker 3: Multi billion dollar organization with yes, billions and billions of
Speaker 3: dollars in art, and it's none of it is listed
Speaker 3: on there in a financial statement. This seems I don't
Speaker 3: even understand how that started.
Speaker 5: Well, that was your reaction is similar to the reaction
Speaker 5: that some of our board members had.
Speaker 3: On top of that, it turns out that the met
Speaker 3: would rather charge admission, cut exhibitions, and get rid of
Speaker 3: ninety people than sell anything, even though they have so
Speaker 3: many things like Islamic rugs that the guy running the
Speaker 3: Islamic rug collection hasn't even seen any of his Islamic
Speaker 3: rugs because they're all in storage somewhere. In fact, most
Speaker 3: of the METS collection is in storage, huge football field
Speaker 3: sized warehouses, presumably somewhere in New Jersey, full of stuff.
Speaker 3: And when the FASB says, why don't you tell us,
Speaker 3: like a normal institution, just how much your stuff is worth?
Speaker 1: Because I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe it would be easier to think rationally about how
Speaker 3: to run things if you knew that fact, the MET
Speaker 3: goes crazy, dispatches c Douglas Dillon to Norwalk, Connecticut to
Speaker 3: say never, not on my watch. We've never done that
Speaker 3: and we never will.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is unlike any other business. You're supposed to
Speaker 6: carry assets at either book or market value, and you're
Speaker 6: supposed to put them in your financial reports, and they don't.
Speaker 3: This is Michael O'Hare, who teaches in the Business School
Speaker 3: of Berkeley. If you ask anyone, anyone who knows the
Speaker 3: way around a bounce sheet about the way museums record
Speaker 3: their assets, you get the Michael O'Hare response.
Speaker 6: I was talking about this at some conference in somebody
Speaker 6: from an orchestra. Some financial person from an orchestra said,
Speaker 6: wait a minute, you mean you buy a painting and
Speaker 6: then it just disappears. And that's what happens. There's an
Speaker 6: expense and then that's the last we hear about it
Speaker 6: in the financial records.
Speaker 7: It's quite quite bizarre.
Speaker 3: For the longest time, I would bore everyone I met
Speaker 3: with how strange I found all this until one day
Speaker 3: I was in Holland on my book tour. In Leiden,
Speaker 3: out with a bunch of people in a bar, and
Speaker 3: I told the group the story of the epic showdown
Speaker 3: between Dennis Beresford and C. Douglas Dillon, and this one guy,
Speaker 3: a philosopher, said, Oh, it's like Smog. Smog, the dragon
Speaker 3: from the Hobbit who sits on a mountain of treasure.
Speaker 3: Smog doesn't want to use his gold, he doesn't wear
Speaker 3: it out to dragons social events. He does not list
Speaker 3: his holdings on his annual dragon financial statement. He just
Speaker 3: wants to hoard it. And I'm like, oh, my god, Smog, Yes,
Speaker 3: that explains everything.
Speaker 8: There was an old dragon and a gray stone. His
Speaker 8: red eyes blinked as he lay alone. His joy was dead,
Speaker 8: and his youth spent. He was knobbed and wrinkled, and
Speaker 8: his limbs bent in the long years to his gold chain,
Speaker 8: his heart's furnished the fired Wayne.
Speaker 3: This is J. R. R. Tolkien reading his poem The Horde.
Speaker 8: To his belly slime gem stuck silver and gold with
Speaker 8: snuff and.
Speaker 3: Lick to his belly's slime gems stuck thick. That's what
Speaker 3: happens when a dragon sits on his treasure for too long,
Speaker 3: and the stuff that couldn't fit under his belly the
Speaker 3: dragon has buried deep inside his lair in storage. Following
Speaker 3: that epiphany in the bar in Leiden, I resolved to
Speaker 3: perform a field test of the hypothesis that art museums
Speaker 3: are modern day versions of the dragon's smog. This was
Speaker 3: a few months back. I was going to be in
Speaker 3: Pittsburgh for another reason anyway, so I decided to pay
Speaker 3: a visit to the Andy Warhol Museum, the largest museum
Speaker 3: devoted to a single artist in North America. So I
Speaker 3: made an appointment with the museum's curator of art, Jessica Beck,
Speaker 3: and on a bright and cold morning in Pittsburgh, I
Speaker 3: headed out to the city's North Shore neighborhood to the
Speaker 3: beautiful old warehouse that holds the museum. I told Beck
Speaker 3: I didn't want to see just the collection, the art
Speaker 3: on the walls. I wanted to see everything. So Beck
Speaker 3: graciously took me upstairs to the archives. Were just off
Speaker 3: the staircase. There were dozens of brown cardboard boxes stacked
Speaker 3: in neat piles.
Speaker 1: Oh I see. Oh they're like.
Speaker 9: They're covered in plastic and you know, kept behind glass. Yeah,
Speaker 9: so this again is just a portion of on my
Speaker 9: whole mother.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wait, how many are here?
Speaker 3: See the cardboard boxes? How's what Warhol called his time capsules.
Speaker 3: There are six hundred and ten of them in total.
Speaker 3: He would put things in these cardboard boxes boxes, tape
Speaker 3: them shut, and set them aside. But he also had
Speaker 3: other boxes, idea boxes what are called basement boxes. After
Speaker 3: Warhol died, everything was shipped to Pittsburgh in an armada
Speaker 3: of tractor trailers. The museum's best guess is that in
Speaker 3: their archive they have at least five hundred thousand objects.
Speaker 3: And so all the other boxes are behind our door.
Speaker 10: Yeah, the rest of them are back there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's not something I can see that I'm not.
Speaker 11: Sure, and I can ask, we can find out because
Speaker 11: I wasn't sure.
Speaker 3: We found one of Warhol's time capsules that had been opened.
Speaker 3: It was on the counter like a patient etherized upon
Speaker 3: a table. We peered inside.
Speaker 11: So this is his fifty suit, oh, nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 11: Hong Kong, so his first trip to Asia. A lot
Speaker 11: of them are closed right now because we're sort of
Speaker 11: trying to figure out how to keep the objects from shifting.
Speaker 3: I was suddenly curious. I wanted to see inside one
Speaker 3: of the clothes boxes. Beck said she didn't have the
Speaker 3: authority to open one up, but she made a few calls.
Speaker 3: Finally she found someone.
Speaker 1: Oh, okay, we have some Okay, that's take a look.
Speaker 3: Another of the museum's staff hurried towards us.
Speaker 11: This is John Malcome.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so we're just gonna peek into one, just to
Speaker 9: get a sense of what.
Speaker 12: I was expressing.
Speaker 11: You know that a lot of things are unfolders.
Speaker 8: But.
Speaker 13: So theyre's they're heavy. Yeah, they're you know, like weigh
Speaker 13: forty or fifty pounds in some cases.
Speaker 3: John positioned himself in front of the box and began
Speaker 3: opening it up. His movements were assured, practiced.
Speaker 13: So, yeah, we treat the box itself like it's part
Speaker 13: of an object, so that's why I wear the gloves.
Speaker 13: So these would have been boxes that Andy would have
Speaker 13: this assistant store things in. We've taken the time to
Speaker 13: align the boxes with this folder type material so that
Speaker 13: the objects in the box do not touch the acidic
Speaker 13: cardboard of the original box, and they're kind of packaged.
Speaker 13: Very objects in here packaged in it's sort of a
Speaker 13: Tetris kind of way with folders that are marked in catalog.
Speaker 1: So in its original form, this stuff would have been.
Speaker 13: Just crammed in it.
Speaker 3: I wasn't sure what I was expecting to see in
Speaker 3: the box. Drawings, notes, makeshift sculptures, old canvases, the working
Speaker 3: life of an artist.
Speaker 13: So this is a pretty cool one. A lenticular of
Speaker 13: the daisies.
Speaker 3: Did he make that or is that just something you bought?
Speaker 1: That was probably something he bought.
Speaker 13: At best, he would have commissioned to be made. And
Speaker 13: I think this was something that was purchased and then
Speaker 13: used as an inspiration for us later work. And you
Speaker 13: can smell it, right, do you do you smell? That's
Speaker 13: that's the object itself off gassing.
Speaker 3: The lenticular is one of those pieces of cardboard with
Speaker 3: an image on it that's printed in such a way
Speaker 3: that it looks like it has three dimensions. They're big
Speaker 3: with children. This one had flowers on it.
Speaker 13: Sometimes we find like notes like well the Andy's intent,
Speaker 13: like why he was collecting this along with the objects that,
Speaker 13: you know what we consider sort of source material.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he's got like six enticulars in that.
Speaker 13: Yep, in that top folder.
Speaker 3: Along with John continued digging deeper, deeper into the same box.
Speaker 3: We found an old movie scrapboard that once belonged to
Speaker 3: a fan somewhere, a bunch of eight by ten glossies
Speaker 3: of movie stars Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, the seal Ball.
Speaker 13: Do you want to go one more folder?
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's do. We'll do one last, one last folder.
Speaker 1: It'll be cool.
Speaker 3: So here as we looked at a piece of what
Speaker 3: seemed like junk mail an invite to an art opening.
Speaker 13: So we even keep the paper clips.
Speaker 3: I see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's quite particulous. Yeah, everything is got, it's still
Speaker 1: are John started whispering.
Speaker 3: It seemed appropriate.
Speaker 1: We were deep in the dragon's lair.
Speaker 3: Now, why are Andy Warhol's time capsules full of junk?
Speaker 3: Because he collected junk?
Speaker 12: Well, if you wanted to meet Andy Warhol, all you
Speaker 12: had to do in the eighties was go to the
Speaker 12: flea market, the sixth Avenue flea Market.
Speaker 3: I'm in New York talking with Simon Dunan writer fashionista.
Speaker 12: In fact, I just would searched flea market in the
Speaker 12: Warhol diaries, and it comes up about twelve times, because
Speaker 12: he's always going to coming from blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: I've known Simon ever since he wrote a book called
Speaker 3: Eccentric Glamour years ago, which included chapters on Simone de
Speaker 3: Beauvoir till the Swinton, the Supermodel, Immon, and Me, which
Speaker 3: remains the most preposterously inaccurate but nonetheless deeply flattering thing
Speaker 3: anyone has ever written about me.
Speaker 1: I love Simon Douna. Anyway.
Speaker 3: Back in the day, Simon knew Andy Warhol and the
Speaker 3: flea market where he hung out.
Speaker 12: It was a protean fleamark. He kept growing, expanding, retreating
Speaker 12: anytime there was a new law available. The flea market
Speaker 12: expanded and it was a significant social scene. Like I
Speaker 12: remember seeing Katherine Deneuve there and it was just a
Speaker 12: place that you went if you were in New York.
Speaker 12: It was a way of you know, checking everybody out,
Speaker 12: meeting your friends.
Speaker 3: We were in Simon's apartment and impossibly sheep worn of rooms.
Speaker 12: I could walk you around and show you many things
Speaker 12: that Jonathan and I or I myself bought at the
Speaker 12: six seven and flea market. That bust of Michael Jackson,
Speaker 12: which people think is that Jeff Coons was ten bucks
Speaker 12: at the flea.
Speaker 3: Market, Po, Jeff good Have you told Jeff Goods? Simon
Speaker 3: didn't found treasure at the flea market. Everyone did, but
Speaker 3: Warhol treated his treasure a little differently.
Speaker 12: When Andy Warhol died, it emerged that he had not
Speaker 12: unpacked most of this stuff that he'd got at the
Speaker 12: flea market. There were these stories, I think in Vanity
Speaker 12: Fair about his house packed with shopping bags that he'd
Speaker 12: gotten at the flea market. When he bought his Russell
Speaker 12: Right china, he collected. He collected those cookie jars famously.
Speaker 12: He would buy those toysher chocolates. He was obsessed with them,
Speaker 12: but he would chew them and spit them out, you know,
Speaker 12: because he was was very concerned about keeping his trim
Speaker 12: little figure. So the idea that he collected these big,
Speaker 12: sort of rotund cookie jars to be stuffed with cookies.
Speaker 12: It's kind of hilarious because he was sort of, you know,
Speaker 12: always very conscious of his figure.
Speaker 3: Andy Warhol was a hoarder, all the classic symptoms. Simon
Speaker 3: didn't used to head up the window dressing department at Barney's,
Speaker 3: and he famously did an homage to Whirl after his
Speaker 3: death entitled The Compulsive Collector.
Speaker 12: We took the mannequin, dressed him in jeans, the blue blazer,
Speaker 12: turtle neck, and then I just went and bought one
Speaker 12: of those tacky Warhol wigs that you could get at
Speaker 12: the Halloween store, put the glasses on him, and instantly
Speaker 12: it became Andy, to the point where Pat Hackett, who
Speaker 12: wrote the Warhol Diaries, was sort of you know, skipping
Speaker 12: down Seventh Avenue and screeched to a she banged on
Speaker 12: the winter. She said to me, I really had a
Speaker 12: heart attack. I thought Andy'd come back from the dead.
Speaker 12: I can show you the window.
Speaker 3: Simon brought out a book filled with pictures of his
Speaker 3: most famous windows.
Speaker 1: Oh, this is fantastic, This is fantastic.
Speaker 12: You can see it looks just like it.
Speaker 3: Just like him, And all around the mannequin was stuff
Speaker 3: the exact same kind of stuff that later found its
Speaker 3: way into the boxes at the Warhol Museum. The definition
Speaker 3: of a collector is someone who collects objects discriminately, someone
Speaker 3: who selects and chooses. But as Simon so nicely put it,
Speaker 3: Andy Warhol was a compulsive collector. His collecting was indiscriminate.
Speaker 3: And what happens when he dies and his indiscriminate collection
Speaker 3: passes into the hands of a museum. They don't edit
Speaker 3: it or streamline it. They keep it exactly as it was,
Speaker 3: hidden away behind locked doors. The Warhol Museum is an
Speaker 3: indiscriminate collection of an indiscriminate collection.
Speaker 10: The special thing about it, I think is that it
Speaker 10: feels like it could be detritus in any other situation, right,
Speaker 10: like remains of a day. Like there's, you know, the
Speaker 10: flight kit you would get on a first class international flight,
Speaker 10: like the slippers, the vomit bag, the silverware from that
Speaker 10: international flight, like in one of the time capsules. So
Speaker 10: it's this like sense of Warhol when you're with the material.
Speaker 10: But then again it's not, you know, I mean, we
Speaker 10: even have the box after he died at the hospital
Speaker 10: of his clothing and his final effects that were left
Speaker 10: at the hospital. We have that box preserved as it
Speaker 10: was picked up from the hospital, so it had his
Speaker 10: jacket in it that he wore to the hospital for
Speaker 10: that final visit. The backpack exactly how it was packed,
Speaker 10: so it has like all of his classes and the
Speaker 10: business card for his doctor in the front pocket.
Speaker 3: Now, I don't mean to pick on the Warhol Museum.
Speaker 3: This is what all art museums do. During his tenure
Speaker 3: running the met, Philippe de Montebello acquired eighty four thousand objects,
Speaker 3: the overwhelming majority of which were packed away in boxes
Speaker 3: and sent to storage in New Jersey, never to be
Speaker 3: seen again. That's not any different from the mountain of
Speaker 3: detritus in cardboard boxes upstairs at the Warhol Museum. Somewhere
Speaker 3: in the United States, there are twin brothers. I don't
Speaker 3: know precisely where they live, but in a big city.
Speaker 3: Can you just describe them. They're not married.
Speaker 7: I take it they're not married.
Speaker 3: The psychologist Randy Frost, who worked closely with them for
Speaker 3: some time, refers to them as Alvin and Jerry, both pseudonyms.
Speaker 3: Born into a wealthy family, childhood prodigies, rumpled suits and
Speaker 3: bow ties.
Speaker 7: These are two people I really liked intensely.
Speaker 3: The brothers lived in adjoining identical penthouse apartments in a hotel,
Speaker 3: each with an eight hundred square foot great room with
Speaker 3: double height ceilings, and each brother had filled his great
Speaker 3: room with things. I'm quoting now from Frost's account of
Speaker 3: the case from a book he co authored called Stuff.
Speaker 3: Every square foot of the great room and dining room
Speaker 3: was packed with works of art and period furniture, eighteenth
Speaker 3: and nineteenth century paintings, sculptures, bus antiques, lamps, jewelry, and more.
Speaker 3: They had no pathways between all of their stuff. You
Speaker 3: stepped over things as you walked. Some of the piles
Speaker 3: were six feet high. On top of the art were
Speaker 3: clothes everywhere, and papers, business cards, bits of junk.
Speaker 7: They were lovely, They were intense in what they did.
Speaker 7: They had this kind of bond as twins, but tension
Speaker 7: at the same time. Fascinating, fascinating characters and really very
Speaker 7: interested in this phenomenon for themselves.
Speaker 3: This phenomenon meaning hoarding. Frost began to study hoarding behaviors
Speaker 3: with the assumption that they sprang from the same place
Speaker 3: as obsessive compulsive disorders. But the more he worked with hoarders,
Speaker 3: the more he became convinced that description didn't fit. OCD.
Speaker 3: Behavior is about the catastrophic reaction to an intrusive thought,
Speaker 3: and those intrusive thoughts are negative danger, threat, contamination. But
Speaker 3: so much of hoarding appeared to be the opposite. It
Speaker 3: appeared to be about pleasure. One of the brothers, Alvin,
Speaker 3: would come home for lunch nearly every day, just to
Speaker 3: be among his things, not to organize, but to enjoy.
Speaker 3: Frost would go with him on some of those visits,
Speaker 3: and Alvin would walk through the chaos, pick up random objects,
Speaker 3: and describe the story behind each one of his treasures.
Speaker 3: Look at this doctor. His voice rose with excitement as
Speaker 3: he found a ring. The ring he thought was from
Speaker 3: western India. It was huge, almost the size of a walnut.
Speaker 3: To savely scene in the book when you're walking through
Speaker 3: Alvin's apartment with him and he's picking up objects, yea,
Speaker 3: but many of those objects have genuine value.
Speaker 14: Many of them did, some of them didn't, some of
Speaker 14: them didn't. And it reminded me a little bit of
Speaker 14: Andy Warhol, because he collected things in this way, and
Speaker 14: things with immense value and things of no value, and
Speaker 14: put them all into these treasure chests.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Was Alvin aware He must have been aware intellectually of
Speaker 3: what was marketplace valuable and what was Yes, it just
Speaker 3: that it was all a value tea.
Speaker 7: It was all value to him, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: And he had no desire. He didn't want to show
Speaker 3: off his treasures in anything. Frost says that the impulse
Speaker 3: to Hoarde has three motivations.
Speaker 14: One is instrumental, that is, I might need it someday.
Speaker 14: The other is emotional, that is, this emotional connection with
Speaker 14: another person or of ant or something. And the third
Speaker 14: is esthetic, this idea of the beauty of the physical world.
Speaker 3: The second of those ideas, the emotional one, Frost describes
Speaker 3: as the proost effect from the famous passage in Prousse's
Speaker 3: Remembrance of Things Past.
Speaker 14: He's eating this cookie and all of a sudden, it
Speaker 14: brings him back to his childhood when his aunt used
Speaker 14: to make these cookies for him, and he remembers the
Speaker 14: way it felt a little bit like the phenomena is
Speaker 14: like hearing a song.
Speaker 7: From your childhood. What started to dawn on me was
Speaker 7: that with people with this problem, these objects form that
Speaker 7: kind of experience in a much more intense way than
Speaker 7: everybody else so somehow these objects are keys to these
Speaker 7: visceral memories that get produced.
Speaker 3: So finding something, anything, some token, some memento, anything that
Speaker 3: from your past triggers a much more vivid recollection than
Speaker 3: in the rest.
Speaker 7: Of us than for the rest of us. Yes, and
Speaker 7: it is a recollection.
Speaker 3: Hold on, it's such a fascinating notion. So you mentioned music,
Speaker 3: so most of us would have it. You know, there
Speaker 3: are songs if you play them, have that thing for me,
Speaker 3: yas only you. I don't know why that sounds, but
Speaker 3: I can imagine. So what you're saying is that feeling
Speaker 3: I have with yas only you, only with a book
Speaker 3: of match box of matches, or absolutely yes, a playbill
Speaker 3: or a yes. One of Frost's patients was a woman
Speaker 3: who couldn't throw away a Disney blanket that her daughter
Speaker 3: had loved as.
Speaker 15: A small child, because she feels like if she throws
Speaker 15: it away, she will lose the memories associated with that blanket,
Speaker 15: and she will lose that piece of history, her personal history.
Speaker 15: And if she throws away too much, there's nothing well
Speaker 15: left of her.
Speaker 3: For another patient, it was one of those ATM cash
Speaker 3: envelopes from five years ago.
Speaker 14: There was no cash in it. She'd spent the cash
Speaker 14: that was in it, but on the back she'd written
Speaker 14: how she spent it, and it wasn't anything unusual, grocery store,
Speaker 14: drugs for a few other items. She put it in
Speaker 14: the recycle box and she started to cry, and she said,
Speaker 14: it feels like I'm losing that day in my life.
Speaker 14: And if I lose too much, there'll be nothing left
Speaker 14: of me.
Speaker 3: There'll be nothing left of me. One of the twin brothers, Alvin,
Speaker 3: was a successful of organizer. He once told Frost that
Speaker 3: he had lost a folder containing his notes from something
Speaker 3: he'd organized, and even though the event was recent, every
Speaker 3: memory he'd had of it was gone, and when he
Speaker 3: found the folder again, his memories returned. If your mind
Speaker 3: works that way, why would you ever throw away that folder?
Speaker 3: Most people would look at this and see a mess,
Speaker 3: he told Frost on one of their visits to his penthouse,
Speaker 3: And then he said, really, it's layered and complex. Their
Speaker 3: penthouses were so overwhelmed with stuff that they had to
Speaker 3: live elsewhere in smaller rooms in the hotel, which were
Speaker 3: also overwhelmed with stuff. But they couldn't part with any
Speaker 3: of it. It would be too great a loss. They
Speaker 3: didn't want to itemize it or put it under balance
Speaker 3: sheet or show the world. I'm sure they had their
Speaker 3: own Islamic rugs buried somewhere in their great room, which
Speaker 3: they had never seen when you got them away from there,
Speaker 3: from the subject of holding it, away from their apartments.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, what were they like?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 14: There, they were fond, they were fascinating, they knew something
Speaker 14: about everything. They were both delightful, delightful people.
Speaker 3: If you talk to a late person, they would probably
Speaker 3: think of holding as a kind of mental illness. I'm
Speaker 3: imagining it's not an mental illness. It's not a it's
Speaker 3: not a deficit that affects all aspects of your functioning.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 14: The way I describe it sometimes is a form of giftedness.
Speaker 14: There's a gift associated with this, an appreciation for the
Speaker 14: physical world, an appreciation for the emotional experience that's associated
Speaker 14: with objects, and and that that gift unfortunately comes with
Speaker 14: a curse, and the curse is not being able to
Speaker 14: manage it.
Speaker 3: The holder is someone with the unusual ability to see
Speaker 3: beauty in the ordinary, which is exactly the point that
Speaker 3: Simon Dona made about Andy Warhol.
Speaker 12: The nicest aspect of him was that he was very democratic. Example,
Speaker 12: he said, if everyone's not a beauty, then nobody is.
Speaker 1: Oh that's kind of lovely, it's fabulous.
Speaker 12: That's why he thought these these drag queens, you know,
Speaker 12: Jackie Curtis and Hollywoodlawn were not objectively Sophia Loren But
Speaker 12: he saw beauty and magic and madness in them.
Speaker 3: You know, you know what, but Simon, that is the
Speaker 3: perfect illustration of the particular condition, wonderful condition of the
Speaker 3: order who applies that same logic to objects. If every
Speaker 3: object is not is not beautiful, then no object is right.
Speaker 1: It's exactly the same.
Speaker 12: Like some crappy old broken toy. It is the same
Speaker 12: as an anouvovarse that your grandmother left you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. That's the That is the god that's.
Speaker 3: It is. Isn't it haunting? And it's why the Warhol
Speaker 3: Museum keeps all of Warhol's boxes, because they have the
Speaker 3: same condition that Warhol had. They have to insist on
Speaker 3: the meaning and beauty in all of that ephemera. They're
Speaker 3: the Warhol Museum, and like the hoarder, they worry that
Speaker 3: if they get rid of any of his stuff, they'll
Speaker 3: lose their connection to him, And can they count that
Speaker 3: stuff up and put a value on it. No, because
Speaker 3: to the hoarder everything is of equal value.
Speaker 5: So you get into these debates. They get esoteric sometimes,
Speaker 5: but you know, standard setting. Eventually the boyd says, all right,
Speaker 5: we got to get to closure. We got to make
Speaker 5: a decision. We can't just go on forever.
Speaker 3: Ron Bossio My Guide to the Hearing of the FASB
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety one, when C. Douglas Dillon appeared in Norwalk,
Speaker 3: Connecticut and stood up before the Vatican of Accounting and said,
Speaker 3: we cannot tell you what we have in our collections.
Speaker 3: That is not the way our imaginations are wired. And
Speaker 3: the Vatican backs down. The accountants realize that this is
Speaker 3: a battle they cannot win, with the result that on
Speaker 3: virtually every American art museum bound sheet there is some
Speaker 3: version of note A. In conformity with accounting policies generally
Speaker 3: followed by art museums, the value of the museum's collections
Speaker 3: has been excluded from the statement of financial position.
Speaker 8: When the moon was new, when the sun yang of
Speaker 8: silver and gold, the gods sang in the green grass
Speaker 8: lays silver spilled and the white waters they with gold filled.
Speaker 3: In Tolkien's poem The Horde, everyone who desired the treasure
Speaker 3: dies in the end, but the treasure remains buried deep
Speaker 3: in giant warehouses.
Speaker 8: In New Jersey, there is an old Horde in a
Speaker 8: dark rock. Have gotten behind doors, and none can unlock
Speaker 8: that grim gate. No man can pass on the mound
Speaker 8: rows the green grass. There sheep feed, and the lock saw,
Speaker 8: and the wind blows from the sea shore. The old
Speaker 8: howde the night shall keep our earthwakes and the elves sleep.
Speaker 3: Revisiono's History is produced by Meelobelle and Leamingesteux, with Jacob Smith,
Speaker 3: Aloise Lytton and Anna naim Our. Editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 3: Original scoring by Luis Gera, mastering by Flon Williams. Fact
Speaker 3: checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin Crew,
Speaker 3: Heaterphane Carly Migliore, Maya Knig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrel and
Speaker 3: of course el Hafe Jacob Weisbering.
Speaker 1: I'm often dropper