Robert Crumb on collecting: it's "creepy"

Robert Crumb, artist and 78 record album collector, talked about the "creepiness" of collecting in a book titled Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting by Brett Milano.

"Collecting is creepy. Record collectors put each other down for their various fixations. Everybody is convinced that his way of collecting is superior. They look down on casual collectors, who are just accumulators — the kind who'll just pick up anything and let it pile up. A true collector is more of a connoisseur, and that's the good thing about collecting. It creates a connoisseurship to sort out what's worthwhile in the culture and what isn't. Wealthy art collectors in this country have sorted out who the great artists are. If you're collecting a lot of objects of one particular kind, you develop a very acute sense of discrimination."

"Any of the younger guys who get into collecting are quirky and oddball types, pretty maladjusted people. They're not into hanging around in bars and picking up chicks or nothing. If they have a girlfriend at all it's amazing. And the older collectors I know, a lot of them just have their little room down in the basement where they go and listen. They don't share it with anyone, and their wives don't know anything about it. So when they die, the vultures start descending."

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