psychology of enough

Hey art lover,

The apartment door opened, and we stepped into what looked like a fever dream. Every single wall, floor to ceiling, was covered in art. Paintings hung three deep in some spots. Sculptures perched on every available surface, including the kitchen counter next to a half-eaten sandwich.

"I know it looks crazy," the collector said, walking between a towering bronze figure and a stack of canvases leaning against the couch, "but I love every single piece."

That visit got us thinking about art hoarding. Obviously, not the billionaire kind where Picassos disappear into Swiss warehouses. The everyday kind.

Andy Warhol's townhouse on East 66th Street was a temple to stuff. When the Pop Art king died in 1987, Sotheby's needed nine full days to auction his possessions: 10,000 lots including 175 cookie jars, dozens of wigs, shopping bags stuffed with receipts, and enough art supplies to stock a university program.

One of Andy’s famous artworks featuring Marilyn Monroe

The art world was split. Was Warhol a visionary collector or a compulsive hoarder? His friend Bob Colacello remembered visiting the house: "You'd find a Cy Twombly painting next to a pile of pizza boxes and yesterday's New York Post. Andy saw beauty in everything, but he also couldn't throw anything away."

The strangest discovery? A room filled with wrapped Christmas presents, gifts Warhol had bought but never given, accumulating year after year like material ghosts of unfinished relationships.

Art storage has become a big industry, with facilities unable to keep up with demand from collectors. It reveals something troubling about contemporary collecting: are people accumulating art to live with, or simply to own?

Consider the psychology at play: collectors who rationalise purchases by promising themselves future space that never materialises. Meanwhile, art that could be enjoyed by everyone stays wrapped in climate-controlled darkness, generating monthly bills.

The secondary market for storage reflects this reality, collectors paying monthly fees for pieces they haven't seen in years, creating underground economies of invisible art.

The NFT crash of 2023 created a new category of digital hoarder: collectors with crypto wallets full of worthless JPEGs they'll never look at again. It also revealed something deeper about contemporary collecting behavior.

There are no physical storage issues, no insurance costs, and no display decisions. It is only acquisition. People do not realise they're hoarding the idea of owning art, not actual art.

Meanwhile, traditional collectors continue their physical accumulation.

Christina Quarles' Los Angeles studio looks like a hurricane hit a figure drawing class; canvases with intertwined bodies, stacked on tables.

"I can't throw anything away," Quarles admits. "Each painting is a conversation with the last one. If I put them in storage, the conversation stops.”, she said in an Instagram story.

Instagram transformed art hoarding from a private obsession to a public performance. Studio visit posts get thousands of likes, the messier, the better. There's a weird flex culture around this, as if quantity equals authenticity.

At LACMA, the Resnick collection occupies an entire floor, hundreds of millions in art, preserved and publicly displayed. It's what art hoarding looks like when it works: passionate accumulation transformed into a cultural gift.

But for every Resnick collection, there are dozens of storage units full of deteriorating canvases, private apartments where masterpieces gather dust, and artists who can't afford studio space.

Galleries are closing at record rates while private collections keep growing. The question is whether all this accumulation serves art itself.

Mental health professionals who work with collectors note that healthy collecting enhances life while problematic collecting controls it. The warning signs are familiar: acquiring becomes more important than experiencing, financial strain develops, and living spaces become secondary to storage needs.

The art world is forcing many collectors to confront these patterns. With gallery sales down while storage costs continue rising, the economics of endless accumulation are becoming unsustainable.

Some collectors are experimenting with "slow collecting", buying only pieces they have space to properly display. Others embrace rotation, keeping most of their collection in storage while actively living with a rotating selection. The most radical approach involves "deaccession parties" where collectors trade or gift pieces they've grown apart from.

As we finish this newsletter, we keep thinking about that first apartment, the one with no empty walls. The collector walked us through room by room, telling stories about each piece: where she found it, why it spoke to her, and how it connected to the work next to it.

In that moment, surrounded by what others might call chaos, we realised that the line between collecting and hoarding isn't about quantity at all. Maybe it's about connection. 

Can you still see the individual pieces, or have they become wallpaper? Do you remember why you bought each work, or did acquisition become automatic?

Art hoarding, like all hoarding, reveals something fundamental about how we value things and how things end up valuing us.

The weirdest thing in your collection that you refuse to get rid of? Hit reply and confess. We promise we won't judge. (Much.)