Dragon Psychology 101

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: 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.

00:00:27
Speaker 3: Eyewitness News ABC seven, New York, March first, twenty eighteen.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: The new policy was announced in January, but it took effect today. Adults who do not have ID proving that they live right here in New York have to pay twenty five dollars. Seniors will pay seventeen dollars.

00:00:44
Speaker 3: 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. They had a forty million dollar deficit. They got rid of ninety employees, Exhibitions were canceled, there was a shakeup 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 in decline. That was followed by one expression of anguish after another, including this from the former chairman of the METS 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 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? I don't know, one hundred billion dollars more. The MET might be the richest non profit institution in human history. All they would have to do is pick a couple things off the shelf and then 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 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 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 Revision's History, I want to explore or our emotional attachment to objects and rituals and tradition and the way in which those attachments betray us. And in this first episode, I would like to make sense of the strange relationship of the art world to art.

00:03:39
Speaker 4: During his thirty one year tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, the mets eighth and longest serving director, guided the acquisition of more than eighty four thousand works of art.

00:03:54
Speaker 3: I found this in a video series called Great Museums. An episode from twenty ten, An Acquiring Mind, lots of wide angle shots of marble floored galleries in guilt frame paintings. NPR Susan Stamberg narrates over what sounds like an orchestra right there on the set.

00:04:11
Speaker 4: Born in France, educated at Harvard in nineteen sixty three, de monte Bello brought a background in European page.

00:04:18
Speaker 3: The film runs for an hour. It's about the most famous director of the Met, Philippe de Montebello, descendant of a noble French family. In particular, it's about how much stuff Philippe de Montebello bought during his thirty one year tenure as head of the Met. Tapestries, African sculptures, a fabulous premiere, an evening gown that's to die for. He even bought things he didn't want to buy.

00:04:41
Speaker 2: Philippe has been an incredible director for supporting the acquisitions of objects of great quality from across the globe.

00:04:49
Speaker 3: 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.

00:04:59
Speaker 4: Today, nearly two million objects, comprising an encyclopedic treasury of world art are contained in the Met's growing color.

00:05:10
Speaker 3: 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 the FASB. The FASB is the Vatican of the American accounting profession, and this was one of the occasional open sessions the FASB 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. The subject accounting for contributions received and contributions made, and capitalization of works of art, historical treasures, and similar assets.

00:06:02
Speaker 1: The room was packed.

00:06:04
Speaker 3: 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 of it, and I would like to direct your attention to a particular exchange. It was between the then chairman of the FASB, Dennis Beresford, and a man named C. Douglas Dylan. Dylan was a tall man, gray suit patrician a certain stature. He was former director of Dylan Red and Co. The Wall Street firm founded by his father, and was possessed of maybe the greatest resume in mid century America. U S Treasury Secretary for 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 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 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 International Hall of Fame. Way back on day one of the proceedings in question, Beresford had made a plane that he wasn't going to stand for any nonsense.

00:07:52
Speaker 1: So C.

00:07:52
Speaker 3: 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. Douglas freaking Dylan. He does a little preamble careful 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 METS collection. And then, and this is maybe my favorite part of the entire nine hundred and forty seven page transcript, Dylan says, quote, we have a new curator of Islamic art, been with us for a couple 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 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, as a matter of deep professional principle, that everything can be counted. And they have proposed that the art world agreed 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 too many of them. They're all buried somewhere in storage. To give you an example, the guy who was responsible for our 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 staffer at the FSB who organized that hearing all those long years ago. His name is Ron Bassio.

00:10:03
Speaker 1: Just retired.

00:10:04
Speaker 5: This is a good exercise for a seventy three year old to test the memory to go back.

00:10:09
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm very impressed.

00:10:13
Speaker 3: Bossio returned to his old offices at FASB headquarters to take my call so he would 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.

00:10:31
Speaker 5: I was just wondering if they could be googled up here as well.

00:10:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's on his computer, I'm online. We're downloading the Metropolitan Museum of Arts 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 makes the pledges. 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. Bossio and I are going down the list of the METS assets. Then there's investments, which I'm assuming is the endowment three point se could.

00:11:28
Speaker 5: Be endowment, or it could be just investments in total. They may not all be part of the endowment.

00:11:34
Speaker 3: Then I have fixed assets three hundred and ninety three million, and then I have collections.

00:11:40
Speaker 1: And I have nothing.

00:11:42
Speaker 3: It's supposed to be a precise accounting of everything that MET has of value, the amount the museum made last year from selling stocks, the amount of cash it has on hand, it's endowment, the amount is owed from various creditors, the amount of 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 next to the line item 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 see note A. Okay, ah here it is 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.

00:12:48
Speaker 1: Excluded. This is a.

00:12:51
Speaker 3: Multi billion dollar organization with yes, billions and billions of dollars in art, and it's none of it is listed on there in a financial statement. This seems I don't even understand how that started.

00:13:04
Speaker 5: Well, that was your reaction is similar to the reaction that some of our board members had.

00:13:11
Speaker 3: On top of that, it turns out that the met would rather charge admission, 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 his Islamic rugs because they're all in storage somewhere. In fact, most of the METS collection is in storage, huge football field sized warehouses, presumably somewhere in New Jersey, 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?

00:13:48
Speaker 1: Because I don't know.

00:13:49
Speaker 3: 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 Norwalk, Connecticut to say never, not on my watch. We've never done that and we never will.

00:14:08
Speaker 6: 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.

00:14:20
Speaker 3: This is Michael O'Hare, who teaches in the Business School of Berkeley. If you ask anyone, anyone who knows the way around a bounce sheet about the way museums record their assets, you get the Michael O'Hare response.

00:14:34
Speaker 6: I was talking about this at some conference in somebody from an orchestra. Some financial person from an orchestra said, wait a minute, you mean you buy a painting and 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.

00:14:52
Speaker 7: It's quite quite bizarre.

00:14:54
Speaker 3: 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 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 it out to dragons 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.

00:15:44
Speaker 8: There was an old dragon and a gray stone. 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 chain, his heart's furnished the fired Wayne.

00:16:02
Speaker 3: This is J. R. R. Tolkien reading his poem The Horde.

00:16:07
Speaker 8: To his belly slime gem stuck silver and gold with snuff and.

00:16:11
Speaker 3: Lick to his belly's 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 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 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 graciously took me upstairs to the archives. Were just off the staircase. There were dozens of brown cardboard boxes stacked in neat piles.

00:17:41
Speaker 1: Oh I see. Oh they're like.

00:17:44
Speaker 9: They're covered in plastic and you know, kept behind glass. Yeah, so this again is just a portion of on my whole mother.

00:17:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, wait, how many are here?

00:17:57
Speaker 3: See 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 boxes boxes, tape them shut, and set them aside. But he also had other boxes, idea boxes what are called basement boxes. After Warhol died, everything was shipped to Pittsburgh in an armada of tractor trailers. The museum's best guess is that in their archive they have at least five hundred thousand objects. And so all the other boxes are behind our door.

00:18:31
Speaker 10: Yeah, the rest of them are back there.

00:18:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's not something I can see that I'm not.

00:18:37
Speaker 11: Sure, and I can ask, we can find out because I wasn't sure.

00:18:42
Speaker 3: We found one of Warhol's time capsules that had been opened. It was on the counter like a patient etherized upon a table. We peered inside.

00:18:52
Speaker 11: So this is his fifty suit, oh, nineteen fifty six, Hong Kong, so his first trip to Asia. A lot of them are closed right now because we're sort of trying to figure out how to keep the objects from shifting.

00:19:06
Speaker 3: 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.

00:19:17
Speaker 1: Oh, okay, we have some Okay, that's take a look.

00:19:23
Speaker 3: Another of the museum's staff hurried towards us.

00:19:26
Speaker 11: This is John Malcome.

00:19:29
Speaker 9: Yeah, so we're just gonna peek into one, just to get a sense of what.

00:19:34
Speaker 12: I was expressing.

00:19:35
Speaker 11: You know that a lot of things are unfolders.

00:19:37
Speaker 8: But.

00:19:39
Speaker 13: So theyre's they're heavy. Yeah, they're you know, like weigh forty or fifty pounds in some cases.

00:19:45
Speaker 3: John positioned himself in front of the box and began opening it up. His movements were assured, practiced.

00:19:54
Speaker 13: So, yeah, we treat the box itself like it's part of an object, so that's why I wear the gloves. So these would have been boxes that Andy would have this assistant store things in. We've taken the time to align 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 it's sort of a Tetris kind of way with folders that are marked in catalog.

00:20:34
Speaker 1: So in its original form, this stuff would have been.

00:20:39
Speaker 13: Just crammed in it.

00:20:41
Speaker 3: I wasn't sure what I was expecting to see in the box. Drawings, notes, makeshift sculptures, old canvases, the working life of an artist.

00:20:52
Speaker 13: So this is a pretty cool one. A lenticular of the daisies.

00:20:57
Speaker 3: Did he make that or is that just something you bought?

00:21:00
Speaker 1: That was probably something he bought.

00:21:02
Speaker 13: At best, he would have commissioned to be made. And I think this was something that was purchased and then used as an inspiration for us later work. And you can smell it, right, do you do you smell? That's that's the object itself off gassing.

00:21:16
Speaker 3: 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.

00:21:28
Speaker 13: Sometimes we find like notes like well the Andy's intent, like why he was collecting this along with the objects that, you know what we consider sort of source material.

00:21:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he's got like six enticulars in that.

00:21:44
Speaker 13: Yep, in that top folder.

00:21:47
Speaker 3: Along with John continued digging deeper, deeper into the same box. We found an old movie scrapboard that once belonged to a fan somewhere, a bunch of eight by ten glossies of movie stars Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, the seal Ball.

00:22:02
Speaker 13: Do you want to go one more folder?

00:22:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's do. We'll do one last, one last folder. It'll be cool.

00:22:08
Speaker 3: So here as we looked at a piece of what seemed like junk mail an invite to an art opening.

00:22:14
Speaker 13: So we even keep the paper clips.

00:22:17
Speaker 3: I see.

00:22:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's quite particulous. Yeah, everything is got, it's still are John started whispering.

00:22:30
Speaker 3: It seemed appropriate.

00:22:32
Speaker 1: We were deep in the dragon's lair.

00:22:40
Speaker 3: Now, why are Andy Warhol's time capsules full of junk? Because he collected junk?

00:22:46
Speaker 12: Well, if you wanted to meet Andy Warhol, all you had to do in the eighties was go to the flea market, the sixth Avenue flea Market.

00:22:56
Speaker 3: I'm in New York talking with Simon Dunan writer fashionista.

00:23:00
Speaker 12: In fact, I just would searched flea market in the Warhol diaries, and it comes up about twelve times, because he's always going to coming from blah blah blah.

00:23:11
Speaker 3: I've known Simon ever since he wrote a book called Eccentric Glamour years ago, which included chapters on Simone de Beauvoir till the Swinton, the Supermodel, Immon, and Me, which remains the most preposterously inaccurate but nonetheless deeply flattering thing anyone has ever written about me.

00:23:31
Speaker 1: I love Simon Douna. Anyway.

00:23:34
Speaker 3: Back in the day, Simon knew Andy Warhol and the flea market where he hung out.

00:23:39
Speaker 12: It was a protean fleamark. He kept growing, expanding, retreating anytime there was a new law available. The flea market expanded and it was a significant social scene. Like I remember seeing Katherine Deneuve 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, meeting your friends.

00:24:05
Speaker 3: We were in Simon's apartment and impossibly sheep worn of rooms.

00:24:09
Speaker 12: I could walk you around and show you many things that Jonathan and I or I myself bought at the six seven and flea market. That bust of Michael Jackson, which people think is that Jeff Coons was ten bucks at the flea.

00:24:23
Speaker 3: Market, Po, Jeff good Have you told Jeff Goods? Simon didn't found treasure at the flea market. Everyone did, but Warhol treated his treasure a little differently.

00:24:36
Speaker 12: When Andy Warhol died, it emerged that he had not unpacked most of this stuff that he'd got at the flea market. There were these stories, I think in Vanity Fair about his house packed with shopping bags 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 toysher chocolates. He was obsessed with them, but he would chew them and spit them out, you know, because he was was very concerned about keeping his trim little figure. So the idea that 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.

00:25:29
Speaker 3: Andy Warhol was a hoarder, all the classic symptoms. Simon didn't used to head up the window dressing department at Barney's, and he famously did an homage to Whirl after his death entitled The Compulsive Collector.

00:25:42
Speaker 12: We took the mannequin, dressed him in jeans, the blue blazer, turtle neck, and then I just went and bought one of those tacky Warhol wigs that you could get at the Halloween store, put the glasses on him, and instantly it became Andy, to the point where Pat Hackett, who wrote the Warhol Diaries, was sort of you know, skipping down Seventh Avenue and screeched to a she banged on the winter. She said to me, I really had a heart attack. I thought Andy'd come back from the dead. I can show you the window.

00:26:18
Speaker 3: Simon brought out a book filled with pictures of his most famous windows.

00:26:22
Speaker 1: Oh, this is fantastic, This is fantastic.

00:26:25
Speaker 12: You can see it looks just like it.

00:26:26
Speaker 3: 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 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 away behind locked doors. The Warhol Museum is an indiscriminate collection of an indiscriminate collection.

00:27:15
Speaker 10: 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 silverware from that international flight, like in one of the time capsules. So it's this like sense of Warhol when you're with the material. But then again 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 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.

00:28:13
Speaker 3: Now, I don't mean to pick on the Warhol Museum. This is what all art museums do. During his tenure running the met, 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 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.

00:28:57
Speaker 7: I take it they're not married.

00:28:59
Speaker 3: The psychologist Randy Frost, who worked closely with them for some time, refers to them as Alvin and Jerry, both pseudonyms. Born into a wealthy family, childhood prodigies, rumpled suits and bow ties.

00:29:12
Speaker 7: These are two people I really liked intensely.

00:29:17
Speaker 3: The brothers lived 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 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. 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, business cards, bits of junk.

00:30:06
Speaker 7: They were lovely, They were intense in what they did. They had this kind of bond as twins, but tension at the same time. Fascinating, fascinating characters and really very interested in this phenomenon for themselves.

00:30:26
Speaker 3: 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, 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. Frost would 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. To savely scene in the book when you're walking through Alvin's apartment with him and he's picking up objects, yea, but many of those objects have genuine value.

00:31:40
Speaker 14: 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 and things of no value, and put them all into these treasure chests.

00:31:57
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah.

00:31:58
Speaker 3: 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.

00:32:08
Speaker 7: It was all value to him, yeah yeah.

00:32:10
Speaker 3: And he had no desire. He didn't want to show off his treasures in anything. Frost says that the impulse to Hoarde has three motivations.

00:32:21
Speaker 14: One is instrumental, that is, I might need it someday. The other is emotional, that is, this emotional connection with another person or of ant or something. And the third is esthetic, this idea of the beauty of the physical world.

00:32:35
Speaker 3: The second of those ideas, the emotional one, Frost describes as the proost effect from the famous passage in Prousse's Remembrance of Things Past.

00:32:45
Speaker 14: 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 like hearing a song.

00:32:58
Speaker 7: From your childhood. What started to dawn on me was that with people with this problem, these objects form that kind of experience in a much more intense way than everybody else so somehow these objects are keys to these visceral memories that get produced.

00:33:22
Speaker 3: So finding something, anything, some token, some memento, anything that from your past triggers a much more vivid recollection than in the rest.

00:33:35
Speaker 7: Of us than for the rest of us. Yes, and it is a recollection.

00:33:41
Speaker 3: Hold on, 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, have that thing for me, yas only you. I don't know why that sounds, but 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 or a yes. One of Frost's patients was a woman who couldn't throw away a Disney blanket that her daughter had loved as.

00:34:13
Speaker 15: 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 away too much, there's nothing well left of her.

00:34:32
Speaker 3: For another patient, it was one of those ATM cash envelopes from five years ago.

00:34:38
Speaker 14: There was no cash in it. She'd 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, drugs for a few other items. She put it in the recycle box and she started to cry, 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.

00:35:02
Speaker 3: There'll be nothing left of me. One of the twin brothers, Alvin, was a successful of organizer. He once told Frost that he had lost a folder 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 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 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 subject of holding it, away from their apartments.

00:36:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, what were they like?

00:36:19
Speaker 7: Oh?

00:36:19
Speaker 14: There, they were fond, they were fascinating, they knew something about everything. They were both delightful, delightful people.

00:36:28
Speaker 3: If you talk to a late person, they would probably think of holding as a kind of mental illness. I'm imagining it's not an mental illness. It's not a it's not a deficit that affects all aspects of your functioning.

00:36:40
Speaker 8: Yeah.

00:36:41
Speaker 14: The way 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, and the curse is not being able to manage it.

00:37:06
Speaker 3: The holder is someone with the unusual ability to see beauty in the ordinary, which is exactly the point that Simon Dona made about Andy Warhol.

00:37:14
Speaker 12: The nicest aspect of him was that he was very democratic. Example, he said, if everyone's not a beauty, then nobody is.

00:37:25
Speaker 1: Oh that's kind of lovely, it's fabulous.

00:37:28
Speaker 12: That's why he thought these these drag queens, you know, Jackie Curtis and Hollywoodlawn were not objectively Sophia Loren But he saw beauty and magic and madness in them.

00:37:41
Speaker 3: You know, you know what, but Simon, that is the perfect illustration of the particular condition, 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.

00:37:57
Speaker 1: It's exactly the same.

00:37:59
Speaker 12: Like some crappy old broken toy. It is the same as an anouvovarse that your grandmother left you.

00:38:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. That's the That is the god that's.

00:38:11
Speaker 3: It is. Isn't 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 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.

00:38:47
Speaker 5: So you get into these debates. They get esoteric sometimes, but you know, standard setting. Eventually the boyd says, all right, we got to get to closure. We got to make a decision. We can't just go on forever.

00:38:58
Speaker 3: Ron Bossio My Guide to the Hearing of the FASB 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 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 of the museum's collections has been excluded from the statement of financial position.

00:39:45
Speaker 8: When the moon was new, when the sun yang of silver and gold, the gods sang in the green grass lays silver spilled and the white waters they with gold filled.

00:39:58
Speaker 3: In Tolkien's poem The Horde, everyone who desired the treasure dies in the end, but the treasure remains buried deep in giant warehouses.

00:40:09
Speaker 8: In New Jersey, there is an old Horde in a dark rock. Have gotten behind doors, and none can unlock that grim gate. No man can pass on the mound rows the green grass. There sheep feed, and the lock saw, and the wind blows from the sea shore. The old howde the night shall keep our earthwakes and the elves sleep.

00:40:40
Speaker 3: Revisiono's History is produced by Meelobelle and Leamingesteux, with Jacob Smith, Aloise Lytton and Anna naim Our. Editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Gera, mastering by Flon Williams. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin Crew, Heaterphane Carly Migliore, Maya Knig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrel and of course el Hafe Jacob Weisbering.

00:41:10
Speaker 1: I'm often dropper