{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Episode 386- James Delbourgo on the 'Noble Madness' of collectors- from Charles Foster Kane to Norman Bates and others, and what Freud had to say about all of them","description":" James Delbourgo, professor of history at Rutgers University and author of A Noble Madness: the Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now, talks about: Why he\u2019s written about contemporary art so extensively, as a history academic who\u2019s very interested in the present, going to galleries and wondering who collectors are right now, raising a lot of questions about archetypes for what would become a big part of his book; how collectors can not only be defined as powerful, they can also be defined as weak, unhinged and deranged, among other things; how the profile of the collector, over time, is more a corkscrew than an arc, with the Freudian view of the collector was seen as repressed and even dangerous, whereas the contemporary collector is seen as being more about power; how in Robert Bloch\u2019s book \u201cPsycho,\u201d upon which the movie was based, the Norman Bates character is actually described as a collector but one who is ugly and unprepossessing, and how the Hitchcock film turned him into a charming, ingratiating figure who turns the audience on his side; how really thoroughly experiencing housed collections (prime examples are the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, CA, and    the Vittoriale degli Italiani in Gardone, owned by Gabrielle d\u2019Anunzio) was embedded in his writing the book; the collector as puppeteer, as orchestrator (and collector) of people, as William Randolph Hearst was; how encountering someone\u2019s place, and their things, is \u201ca physical experience that constitutes the way you understand this person and your relationship to them,\u201d as James put it; and how Freudian interpretation has had such a lasting relevance over the years, even as it\u2019s gone out of fashion. In the 2nd half of our conversation, available to Patreon Supporters of the podcast, you\u2019ll hear James talk about: How hoarding, like the Middle Ages, has waned, and is tossed around far too lazily; the \u2018l\u2019 word, as in \u201closer,\u201d which he used to describe Robert Bloch\u2019s Norman Bates, whom he qualifies as a \u2018lovable loser,\u2019 particularly because collectors like Bates collect authentically, out of passion, not for financial gains; how he couldn\u2019t quite get the marketing department to change the subtitle of his book (particularly \u201cThe Dark Side\u201d part), and why he\u2019s interested in authentic collectors, those who collect for love, with no thoughts of profits or strategy, the type of collector who he believes is vindicated in the end, as opposed to the Charles Foster Kane-type collector, who collects to accumulate; the democratization of collecting, including \u2018garbologists,\u2019 in which everything can, and does, get commodified; countercultural collectors, who collect things like deformed animal corpses, their own child\u2019s placentas, and other curiosities, and how they don\u2019t care what people think of them, or in fact that they want to defy popular opinion\u2026as James put it: \u201ctheir truth to self is uncompromised\u2026by notions of taste or fine arts or utilitarianism\u2026they\u2019re the freest people of all\u2026they\u2019ve freed themselves from the tyranny of the respectable opinion of other people;\u201d and finally he describes an exhibition about Marie Antoinette at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (the lines to get in were staggering), a collector of shoes and porcelain and snuff boxes and furniture\u2026who was so vilified\/demonized for political reasons, as the enemy of the people\u2026she is the classic case of the political demonization of a collector who is executed as if it would purge the suffering of her subjects; the most classic case of that political question around the collector, and how, ironically, it was her execution that made her immortal.   ","author_name":"The Conversation Art Podcast","author_url":"https:\/\/theconversationpod.com","html":"