John Berger from About Looking
Duchamp was not an iconoclast: he was a new type of curator.Berger's 1974 observation shapes an approach to art that is useful for understanding those assemblages that are in essence collections of objects with tags.
The collector speaks.
The conversation moves on to a painting she has just bought. A bunch of tulips arranged in a crystal vase, their white petals streaked with yellow and pink. One of the petals has fallen off already onto the lace-trimmed tablecloth. A dewdrop glitters on it. A vanitas painting, the dealer called it, portraying the transience of life. In the background, on the same tablecloth, one can discern the shapes of an hourglass and a crumbled piece of bread.The narrative voice is that of Catherine the Great in Eva Stachniak's novel Empress of the Night.
It has to one side of the main arrangement a little plug of primula and to the other side a nest with blue eggs. It unfortunately doesn't appear in the list of works by Rachel Ruysch that are generally accepted as autograph by the Netherlands Institute for Art History in a listing graciously located on Wikipedia. There are other paintings with nests. Which leads me to recall Gay Bilson's cookbook Plenty: Digressions on Food which has pictures of nests she has collected and of which she says in an interview with Penelope Debelle "Nests have no value and are not found at auctions. This is one of the great pleasures of collecting them."
Aldous Huxley at the beginning of Heaven and Hell argues for the work of gathering:
However lowly, the work of the collector must be done, before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks of classification, analysis, experiment and theory making.
