Aesthetic experience and collecting
Collaboration by Mercedes Barrera
Being an art collector implies owning a certain and relevant number of works that may or may not be related to each other. The idea of collection as fragments of a whole goes back to the history of man, relating the concept to a form of accumulation that grants prestige through the display of what is possessed and relevance within the economic sphere. However, what can mean an expression of personality through the material testimony of what is collected is an activity that has been and is little developed, and there is a lack of knowledge about its value and its real importance.
Despite the fact that there has been an evolution and boom in collecting in recent years, in Chile there are only less than 35 recognized fans; although this number may not include those who are still ashamed to show themselves as such, it is a low figure. Even more so if we link this to the fact that collections contribute to strengthening the national heritage of a country and defining its cultural identity; how can we reverse this trend that reflects strengths and weaknesses within the field? On the one hand, demystifying false beliefs and permeating the concept of collecting art in order to strip it of its conceptual hermeticism, revealing its true meaning.
Immersing oneself in the art of collecting does not imply being the possessor of great fortunes or complex knowledge: entering into this discipline implies internalizing ourselves in a true aesthetic experience that improves our visual literacy and leads us to produce autonomous knowledge. A critical visual thought that will allow us to become passive consumers of images, promoters of horizontal artistic education, so important in the conquest of everyday life. Art and its connection with it, can not only portray in detail ways of being and thinking, it also connects us with our creative side, bringing us closer to the unknown, allowing us to explore new frontiers of knowledge and move the existing ones a little further.
Collecting art can be a real value in itself, allowing us to connect with a new system of meanings and strengthen our system of individual values, awakening fascination, sharpening our senses towards diverse realities and subjects, helping us to understand contexts and orders of things. Collecting is opening new avenues of creation in the traits of our personality, motivations and values, connecting us with hidden personal certainties, allowing us to work on self-teaching in the face of the potential of active ignorance. The lack of visual literacy distances us from the spaces that allow us to ask questions or just think of other answers, disconnecting us from introspection in the spaces of pause; the relevant role that cultural consumption has had in the face of confinement has been demonstrated during this pandemic, providing answers to the anguish of the passage of time and uncertainty.
In this new context, which requires the articulation of different strategies that contribute to the production of knowledge and the consolidation of digitalization as a new support for communication and creation, Collectio joins the challenge of promoting the art of collecting local artistic heritage by encouraging horizontality through the visibility of new, emerging and established talents. Through its digital platform, its artists show us the new underlying languages that coexist in everyday life, allowing us to enter new horizons of interpretation.
The Collectio universe is based on promoting the sensitivity of the aesthetic taste that exists in nature and the collaboration of different artistic manifestations, recreating timeless bridges, new questions and opposites, exploration of urban landscapes, movement through the search for new forms of color, de-hierarchization of forms, signs with their own language and rhythm. Collectio aims to facilitate sensitive knowledge and permanent creative dialogue through the surprise factor of rediscovering the unknown.
Be careful with art, as Nemesio Antúnez would say. Everyone is invited.
