Cultural Capital: Why Do People Collect?

There was time when rich people were en- tombed with their possessions. As their servants piled their belongings, knick knacks, art collections, golden boats and mummified pets into the tomb – and just before they drank the poison that’d ensure they’d be on hand for their former masters in the afterlife – they must have thanked the gods for their fortune being born to serve those high-ranking patrons of culture.

Of course, these days people don’t tend to be entombed with their stuff. Instead it’s all given away while they’re still alive. This has two major advantages: the tax breaks that make donating substantial art collections so much easier to bear; and the keen sense of appreciation felt by the public, paid back in spades by widespread adulation for the donor.

Once upon a time people donated their art to museums. Australian arts patrons and col- lectors whose donations either founded or bolstered Australia’s art museum collections include the likes of Fay, Smorgon, Fairfax, Schaeffer, Cruthers, Hinton, Power, Reed,

Coventry, Kaldor, and many others down the decades – not that everyone who sees the art they donated will remember their names be- fore the artists who made the work itself. But still, it’s nice to be reminded why sometimes we really can have nice things.

Another way to achieve a kind of proximate immortality is to get involved in the making of art. Or if you’re really ambitious, in the making culture itself. The old way was to commission artists to paint your portrait, or the portrait of the board members, or a portrait of the lady wife who died tragically young in a freak accident during a routine liposuction. But history – and portrait prize competitions – have proven that we only really appreciate portraits of royalty, artists, gallerists or pop stars after they have died.

Nowadays smart art collectors yearning for immortality will put down their cash for building big expensive art museums, or for a series of site-specific sculptures that will be sited on public land. They will appoint curators to choose which over- seas artists are good enough to make works here, or they will corner the market on art from Cana- da and build a beautiful giant warehouse conversion that not only functions as a home for their Canadian art, but that will be the anchor for the gentrification of a formerly foul-smelling factory district that did nothing more than make beer for the working class, but is now the sparkling centre of a city that looks like the world of tomorrow.

But the smartest way to achieve immortality is to create a cultural program. What is a cultural program? No one knows, but we will be thanking whoever put it together as we are sealed inside their glittering tombs of fame.

Andrew Frost