Why do we amass stuff we don’t need? Not all collecting is art collecting and no real collector would acquire things just as a status enhancement or investment. Real collectors are after something else. The objects in their collection are taken out of use, removed from circulation. The real value of a piece lies not in its auction price, but in the importance it has in the collection.

No true devotee would buy a T-shirt worn by Mick Jagger during a concert, chuck it in the washing machine and wear it. A Mick Jagger T-shirt is no longer a T-shirt, it’s a

connection to the world of Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll, a form of genius, a dream. Collected objects are like holy relics: conduits to another world. They have shed their original function and become totems, fetishes. Collecting by its very nature is animist and transcendental.

The objects and their organization bind us to something larger than ourselves, and as religion was born out of a fear of death and the wish of eternal life, collecting expresses the same fundamental urges. There are two corresponding impulses in collecting. One, epitomized by Casanova and Don Giovanni, show the erotic side of the object as fetish: the fury of conquest exhausting itself in the act (acquired objects are no longer as important as those still to be conquered) and living on only in Casanova’s Memoirs and Don Giovanni’s catalog of women, faded records of past glory.

The second, totemic impulse brings to mind a pharaoh’s tomb. Carefully arranged around the sarcophagus are representatives of the king’s possessions, of the wealth and the resources he needs to live on in the afterworld. Their presence is symbolic, but it assures survival. It is remarkable how many collectors chose to be immortalized through their collections, either by naming and donating them, by a continued presence as founder’s portrait or statue, or even as a wax work.

Like relics, collected objects are keys to another world and guarantors of immortality. That is why our urge to collect is impossible to ignore: it touches the very depths of who we are.