ABSTRACT
Thinking of the collector as a muse, as dedicated to inspiring artists, seems counter-intuitive: we tend to think of major collectors as dedicated only to themselves, buying art to gain prestige and power from its display, and to diversify their portfolios. This view is reinforced when the media trumpets “new record price!” for art that many consider of dubious value. We meet a very different sort of collector in Megumi Sasaki’s documentary film Herb and Dorothy (Sasaki, 2008).1 Sasaki, a Japanese woman making
her debut as a filmmaker, traces the married life of the Vogels, a couple of modest means who nevertheless acquired and then gave to the National Gallery of Art (NGA) a major collection of Minimalist and Conceptual artworks (Figure 5.1). NGA curator Jack Cowart considers their achieve - ment “an astounding phenomenon.” Moreover, for at least some of “their” artists, they functioned as a muse-broadening our view of what it can mean to be a collector, as well as what it can mean to be a muse, and providing an entry point to study the role of the muse from a psychoanalytic perspective.
