Publication details
Old vs. new middle class collecting identity? In searching for the systematization in the modernism art collecting studies
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Attached files | |
| Description | According to what we know so far, art collecting phenomenon appears to be essential part of modernist middle class behavioural patterns at the traditional Euro-Atlantic society – at least from the late 19th century. Thanks to the intense international research, we could quote an amount of case studies on individual collectors, all of them within the limits of a socio-economic-historical coordinates given. But is there a way to systematize these findings, to make them a bit more comparable with each other so as to have higher informative reference value? The paper endeavours to examines the potential of recent concepts of two parallel middle classes (Peter Berger) – the old, traditional middle class and the new middle class, the knowledge class – applied on the field of modernist art collecting studies. I analyse the specific phenomenon of dozens of art collections of businessmen, bankers, lawyers, attorneys, doctors as well as publishers, architects or artists – representatives of the quickly developing old and new middle class – that had been founded or built within the interwar period in Central Europe, as the notable integral parts of the social identity prospective constructs and private as well as professional lives lived by their owners. On the base of analyses for the Czech lands collecting development led in the previous years, I suggest structural societal categorization that enables to link certain behavioural collecting attitudes and preferences to the individual identifiable social class or group more clearly. Thought I believe that just this kind of structural sociological systematization – taking into account the dichotomy between the old middle class and the new knowledge class and their references to the nobility as descending but admired and still influential stratum and lifestyle indicator – could essentially enhance our understanding of the modernism collecting phenomenon. Finally, I would like to point out, how this way of interpretation could shed the new light even on the post-WWII Central European collecting specifics – the collecting behind the Iron Curtain. |
| Related projects: |