It's a kind of art.

I was doing my morning blog reads and noticed CrazySteve did a post that referenced a very good article from the San Francisco Chronicle on collecting and collectors from a few years back.

Call them what you will -- obsessive compulsive eccentrics, materialist philosophers or pack-rat artists -- collectors' 'unruly passions' make sense of our world (San Francisco Chronicle, December 15, 2003)

Damn this article has some great quotes!!!

"Having something that nobody else owns or that very few people own or that they can't afford to own is very gratifying," says Barlow. "You're a collector first. What you're going to collect comes next."

...Acknowledging aspects of compulsion and raw competition, UCSF clinical professor of psychiatry Graeme Hanson sees collecting as a blend of acquisitiveness, intellectual curiosity, a desire to possess and organize tangible objects, the lure of immortality and "a certain amount of showing off. " Why certain people leave their childhood Barbie doll and penny collections behind and others become committed collectors, he concedes, is a psychological riddle.

...Why do they do it?

Like many collectors, Keillor initially comes up blank when asked why he got started and why watches and pens. "Collectors are always in the moment," as Schaffner says. Motive may be so fundamental, so intrinsic that it simply doesn't consciously engage a collector's attention. Focusing on objects, after all, their beauty, function and relationship to each other, may be a kind of self-sustaining process of externalized emotion. It's a kind of art.

...While the urge to acquire first-edition books, Japanese woodblock prints, baseball cards, Beanie Babies or vintage Barolos might be seen as a telling reflection of consumerist excess and licensed dysfunction, it is also a way of apprehending a bewildering world and finding one's place in it.

...Collectors throughout history have felt that same time-conquering reward. Largely pursued by privileged Medici-level cognoscenti until the 16th century, collecting expanded with what Blom calls "a spirit of Renaissance inquiry" and an emerging secular curiosity about the world. Soon enough, along with books and works of art, collectors were acquiring everything from skulls and butterflies to preserved anatomical oddities and sock monkeys.

...Collecting, hoarding's socially sanctioned cousin, may finally resist scrutiny and causal dissection as well. Whether someone collects in a public, legacy-making way, like Asian art patron Avery Brundage, or squirrels away his world-class scrimshaw for no one else to see, the process is always and specifically individual. Perhaps that's why collectors, in their singular pursuits, fascinate and unite us. Their passions, unruly or not, pry open the world and reveal some hidden order and harmony.

I think I now know what I need to do at the Gay Robot Convention.

I need to have my own anti-collecting panel a la a 12-Step Program for TF Collectors.

How 'bout that?

That would at least be something new at one of these conventions.

Oh. Less than 2 weeks until the con and they still haven't announced any guests other than David Kaye.

Either this is meant to be a surprise or literally they are hoping that fanboys should be happy enough that they plopped down $25 for the movie and get a tour of Hasbro cubicles.