C is for Collecting - B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

The collecting impulse is universal, and it goes to the roots of what it is to be human. It pre-dates mass production and design, but it reveals the essential nature of our relationship with our possessions, how they communicate with us, and the various ways in which we value them. Understanding the nature of collecting tells us something about ourselves as well as about the nature of things.

We collect possessions to comfort ourselves, from addiction, and to measure out the passing of our lives - from wedding rings to birthday presents. We collect because we are drawn to the glitter of shiny metal, or its more recent matt-black equivalent, and to the subtler pleasure of nostalgia for the recent past, and the memory of far-distant history. We collect objects to learn more about the world, and the people who shaped it. We collect to improve ourselves, to demonstrate our taste, to inject a sense of order, discipline and control into our lives, and sometimes to signal our distress and console ourselves in our inability to deal with the world. These are the motivations that designers need to understand, and the qualities which they manipulate when they create objects, whatever their nominal function.

To collect any kind of ostensibly utilitarian object betrays the anything-but-utilitarian nature of the significance that they have for us. When we collect an object, from a chair to a banknote, we have cancelled out its nominal purpose. We have traded in the original meaning and are looking for something else from them.

Given that it is perfectly possible to use a laptop or smartphone to listen to just about any radio station on earth, perhaps nobody needs to own a radio at all. But putting that to one side, one radio per household member should more than suffice for all practical purposes. How then can I justify the fact that I have four radios in my study, only one of which I have switched on in the past eight years, three more in my bedroom, one in my bathroom and yet another three in my kitchen? An art dealer of my acquaintance has more than 300 radio sets, the most recent of them manufactured in 1961, and some dating back as far as 1924. Clearly it is not their signal and sound quality that explains why we want to have them. They are reminders of a time when a wireless set was a piece of furniture that occupied a position at the centre of the home as important as the hearth. Twist a knob, and a distant announcer’s voice would come flooding into sharp focus, bringing news of disaster and deliverance. Tuning Wells Coates’s circular set for Ecko, designed in 1932, lights up the name of one long-gone ghost station after another, but it is the voices of today’s BBC broadcasters that emerge from the loudspeaker, not men in dinner jackets reading the news in received pronunciation English.

Radio design depended on countless variations of a basic theme centred on the tuning process, the off switch and the loudspeaker. The earliest radio I have is made by Brionvega, designed by Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper in the early 1960s, and is based around a hinge. The loudspeaker is in one half, the tuner in the other. The two halves can fold shut, to be carried, or open up when in use. The controls move up and down, to reveal a flash of colour. For me it is the summation of a particular moment in Italian design, and an insight into the minds of two of its most gifted designers. They had transformed what had become a familiar, everyday device, and given it the promise, if not the substance, of a far more capable piece of technology. I have a Bang & Olufsen Beolit 707, designed with the austerity of a Danish town hall from the 1950s, and a Braun clock radio: a curious twin-eyed box from which the clear Perspex grille has come detached, revealing the cardboard loudspeaker drum that it once concealed.

And then there are the banknotes. I have a ten-year-old Turkish 100,000-lira note that is a lesson in national iconography and economics. Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, is represented on one side in his double-breasted suit, handkerchief in his top pocket, receiving a bouquet of flowers from a cluster of children in the manner of dictators everywhere. On the other side, less conventionally, he appears twice. In one cameo he is portrayed in his uniform as an equestrian statue, drawing his sword. The other, larger image shows him in wing collar and striped tie, smiling through a lock of hair flopping forward. Since this note was issued, Turkey has decided to re-denominate its currency, knocking a whole line of noughts off the banknote, but retaining Atatürk and his dress shirt. It sits in a drawer in my study, along with a Bank of China foreign-exchange certificate that looks like a cigarette coupon, a Singapore dollar with a junk on one side and the Sentosa Satellite Earth Station on the other, and a Reserve Bank of India note. The Indian note is guaranteed by the central government and shows the marks of a dozen pins that have been used by previous owners to keep it safe. I have several notes with images of architects on them. The £20 Clydesdale note with Glasgow’s second-most famous architect, Alexander Greek Thomson, issued in 1999, is framed on the wall of my study. It was designed to mark Glasgow’s City of Architecture and Design year. Fred Goodwin signed it personally before he left the Clydesdale to run the Royal Bank of Scotland into the ground.

The current Swiss ten-franc note with Le Corbusier on it is in an envelope, alongside a defunct Finnish fifty-markka note featuring Alvar Aalto, and the Slovenian 500-toller bill with Jože Plečnik, architect of Ljubljana’s university library, portrayed in bow tie, broad-brimmed hat and beard, and an ancient 1,000-crown Austro-Hungarian banknote that my grandmother folded away for a rainy day.

I have the ten-guilder Dutch note that came as close as banknotes ever have to complete abstraction, and the Hong Kong ten-dollar note that looks remarkably like it. This is not what a collector would call a collection at all. But I am interested in what this apparently random accumulation of banknotes has to say about how nations choose to portray themselves, and what that reveals about them.

I lack the discipline to be a collector’s collector. I have no desire to gather together an example of every Braun radio ever made, just as I was never very organized about stamps, never quite working out if I was after complete definitive sets or chronological completeness.

I find it impossible to fill a notebook from start to finish, but dart about from back to front, using up three pages here, half a page there, sometimes one way up, sometimes another. I am content to have a sequence of radios on my desk, one shelf away from the row of miniature modern classic chairs. These, of course, are shameless about having no purpose other than to be collected and sit on a shelf, like a line of Eiffel-Tower-in-a-snowstorm paperweights. The private urge to collect reflects a compulsion to acquire, label, place and fix, and so to instigate order.

Public museum collections have another purpose; they are used to convey messages about how countries, or leaders, see themselves, from Napoleon’s triumphalist looting of Italy to fill the Louvre to the idea of shoring up a sense of national identity that underpins the modern Greek interest in the Parthenon marbles. Or in the way that the Tate in London took the decision to divide itself into Tate Britain and Tate Modern, to convey a more complex sensibility about Britain’s evolving sense of itself. Public and private collections have a way of merging into each other. Some collectors are driven by a private hunger; there are others consumed by a need for public recognition, something that goes beyond personal hinterland and tips into vanity. Armand Hammer, for one, had sufficient self-belief to presume to name a folio of Leonardo da Vinci drawings the Codex Hammer, simply because he happened to have owned them for fourteen years. It’s not the designation that the current owner, Bill Gates, has adopted.

One way to understand collecting is to view it as involving the accumulation of appropriate relics with which to fill the shrine that will make the founder’s name immortal, a modern version of Chinese paper grave goods, or the equipment entombed with the pharaohs to furnish their needs in the afterlife. That is definitely the message you get at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where some bequests were made on the condition that collections would be shown exactly as they were once displayed in the home of the donor, with rooms recreated in minute detail.

A more nuanced understanding of collecting looks beyond status, death and profit, and explores a collection as a chance to impose control and order on that tiny part of the disorderly universe which is within the reach of an individual. Even the most celebrated collectors may appear to have no coherent view about why they do it, but their lives offer some clues. When Jean Paul Getty was America’s richest man, he kept a stream of fine-art shippers constantly on the move. Month after month through the 1960s and early 1970s, a seemingly endless supply of carefully packed crates, to be opened only in climate-controlled conditions, travelled back and forth across the world accompanied by couriers wearing white cotton gloves. Inside these beautifully made cases, each stencilled with his name, were French tapestries, rococo furniture, rare books, paintings, sculptures and silverware that Getty himself sometimes never even saw. He kept telling himself, and the world, that his collecting days were over, that he had stopped in 1964, but there was always another Rubens to buy, another vase or another Seurat.

His agents bought them in the world’s auction rooms and from favoured dealers. Some were shipped directly to Malibu, to the museum that bore his name, which he paid to build, and for which he met all the running costs, but which he never visited. Some were donated to other museums. A few ended up at his house in England.

It hadn’t always been that way. The twenty-five-foot long Ardabil carpet, woven in the sixteenth century, that he bought in 1931 for $70,000 and called ‘the finest Persian carpet in the world’ spent some time on the floor of his apartment in New York. What he did not say is that it was one of a pair acquired in 1870 by a British dealer, and that his carpet had been partially sacrificed to restore the larger version that is still in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Getty said that he turned down an offer of $250,000 from King Farouk of Egypt, who wanted it as a wedding gift for the Shah of Iran. Not long after acquiring it, Getty gave it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. ‘It has been said that the carpet is too good to be seen by Christian eyes, but for me it was just too good to be seen by just a few people, and so I donated it to the museum,’ Getty wrote in his memoirs.

Collecting for Getty had begun as a personal obsession with Roman and Greek relics, French furniture and European painting. Then his idiosyncratic collection began to be seen by a handful of visitors on the limited number of days that his weekend house in Malibu opened to the public. When Getty moved to Europe, he left behind a purpose-built private museum housed in an archaeologically precise recreation of a Pompeian villa. After Getty’s death, his trustees poured his money into a series of new buildings for the sprawling Getty Center with its archives, study centres and its museum. The architecture, by Richard Meier, would be unlikely to have appealed to its benefactor, given his reluctance to acquire anything later than the Impressionists, and judging from his remark in 1970 that ‘I refuse to pay for one of those concrete-bunker-type structures that are the fad among museum architects nor for some stainless steel and tinted glass monstrosity.’

What drove Getty to collect so compulsively when he was so financially cautious that he had a payphone installed in Sutton Place, his Tudor home in Surrey? Getty was self-confident enough to have constructed a version of the story that presented his collection as both a personal pleasure and a civic duty. In 1965, Getty published The Joys of Collecting, more of a pamphlet than a book, in which he said that he hoped his ‘modest and unpretentious’ museum would ‘provide pleasure to the people from the Los Angeles region who were interested in my collection’. More revealingly, he described collecting as ‘one of the most exhilarating and satisfying of all human endeavours’. Getty talks of ‘the pleasure that comes from getting what you want’. The pleasure Getty took from his collection seems to have come from asserting his view of the world against that of the common herd, to demonstrate that he did things his own way. ‘Following the crowd offers no real satisfaction,’ Getty said. But he was not oblivious to what others said and thought of him. He was sensitive enough never to forget a sleight, and combative enough always to try to have the last word. He quoted one critic who accused him of dilettantism: ‘Paul Getty buys only what he likes and lacks the singleness of purpose and the concentration that … should characterize a collection.’ He then cites in self-justification the words of Sir Alec Martin, chairman of Christie’s auction house, an institution of which Getty was an important customer. Martin declared, ‘I am rather fed up with these impersonal complete collections which are chosen by someone for somebody else,’ and went on to praise the enormous public service that Getty’s collection represented.

In his combative and garrulous autobiography, As I See It, Getty repeats every newspaper story about him, from non-existent assignations in the bar at the Hotel Pierre to the reception his collection and his museum got from the critics, only to swat them away. ‘Reconstructing the Villa dei Papyri was seen as unconventional, and un-museum-like, by which I suppose they mean it did not look like penitentiary modern like so many museums,’ he wrote. But all the unruffled Getty, as he describes himself, has to do is wait long enough, and pretty soon he can quote the LA Times’s critic claiming that there is no better museum in the USA.

Getty goes on to explain that having donated the collection, paid for the cost of building the museum, as well as the salaries and the running costs, expenditure that he itemized down to the last cent, each of the 300,000 visitors a year was costing him ten dollars or, after allowing for tax relief, three dollars.

The Joys of Collecting talks about the way that judicious contrasts between paintings from different periods can be made by relying on the enlightened eye of the collector. ‘Raphael and Renoir can comfortably sit in the same room.’ But to squeeze in Op Art would have been going too far for Getty.

The diaries Getty kept from 1938 to 1976, in uniform ring-binder notebooks, offer some better clues as to what it was that drove him. They have all been digitized now and, with the exception of the politically sensitive material on his dealings with the Saudi and Iranian royal families, they can be read online. In handwriting that lurches back and forth over the years from the chaotically illegible to the laboriously childish, he records visiting half-empty museums. He noted a nineteenth-century mansion that impressed him and which he thought ‘must have cost $2 million complete with furnishings and works of art’. In this same laundry-list tone, he records his blood pressure, the state of his stools, the time of the train he took to Dover, and the price he paid for some oil shares. He records his first meeting with Lord Duveen, precursor of every contemporary art dealer, who, with the convenient attributions furnished him by Bernard Berenson, equipped America’s robber barons with all that they desired in the way of culture.

Duveen was the Gagosian and the Jopling of his day, mixing with East Coast American new money and dealing in old masters rather than Ukrainian oligarchs and Damien Hirst, but offering them much the same range of services. Duveen, Getty said, looked ‘55 but was aged 69’. Getty noted that in one year Henry Frick had spent $7 million with Duveen, including the purchase of the ‘Fragonard room to Frick for $1.25m having bought it from Morgan’. Of his own first purchase from Duveen, Getty notes: ‘Bought a carpet that had belonged to the Sultan of Turkey, taken in spoil in Vienna in 1689.’ He then records its size, its previous owners, and what he had paid for it. Clearly questionable provenance was not something that Getty was squeamish about. As he acknowledged, the Ardabil carpet might well have been looted too. He recounts the suggestion that Russian troops took it from the shrine for which it was originally woven.

To judge by Getty’s case, there is a connection of some kind between the collecting impulse and a passionate commitment to diary-keeping. It is more than wordplay to suggest that a diary is about recollection. It is certainly true that diaries are about establishing a sense of order in the confusion of the world, and perhaps to provide a similar kind of record that provenance offers a work of art. Nobody would read Getty’s diaries for their literary quality. Henry James and Walter Benjamin offer rather more elegance. Getty’s diaries remind us of the challenge that faces researchers when so much source material is instantly accessible. It’s not enough for the academic to triumphantly gain access to an archive. They need to make something of the material.

James and Benjamin were both fascinated by the idea of collecting, and they also spent their lives collecting impressions for their diaries, listing and archiving them. They reflected on the meaning of collections and museums. In his novel The Spoils of Poynton, James wrote: ‘ “Things” were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs Gereth, the sum of the world was rare French furniture and oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine people’s not having, but she couldn’t imagine their not wanting and not missing.’

Walter Benjamin famously examined the impulse behind collecting in The Arcades Project. He wrote that:

For the collector, the world is present, indeed ordered, in each of his objects. We need only recall what importance a particular collector attaches not only to his object, but also to its entire past, whether this concerns the origin and objective characteristics of the thing. Or the details of its external history, previous owners, price of purchase current value and so on. All of these ‘objective’ data come together for the true collector, in every single one of his possessions, to form a whole magical encyclopaedia, a world ordered, whose centre is in the fate of objects. It suffices to observe just one collector, as he handles the items in his showcase. No sooner does he hold them in his hand than he appears inspired by them, and seems to look through them into the distance, like a portent of the future.

Benjamin, who was very particular about his own notebooks, never saw Getty’s diaries, but he could have been describing them.

Despite his huge financial success, and the breezy self-confidence of his memoirs, aspects of Getty’s personal history suggest a man driven by compulsions and anxieties. As he grew older, he experienced an increasing fear of flying. Collecting offered solace. Life has no pattern, but a collection, even one that he did not see much of but simply ordered into existence, could create at least the sense of internal consistency that offers purpose, structure, meaning and, most of all, control.

Sigmund Freud devoted considerable attention to the psychopathology of gambling, an addiction which he did not have, and to smoking, an addiction which he did. But he said less about collecting, which was a compulsion for him. In 1938, just before Freud was forced to leave Nazicontrolled Vienna for exile in London, Edmund Engleman photographed the 2,000 or so objects Freud had acquired over the previous forty years since his father had died. On his desk he had a representation of Isis suckling the infant Horus, made before 664 BC. He bought pieces of Greek and Roman statuary and ancient Chinese ceramics. Engleman’s photographs provided a record that allowed his loyal assistant to replicate the desk cluttered with specimens that had always dominated Freud’s consulting rooms when he got to England.

In 1899, while working on The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud took a fragment of his collection with him to his retreat in the mountains. ‘My old grubby gods who take part in the works as paperweights for the manuscripts,’ as he described them. He once told Jung: ‘I must always have an object to love.’

Interestingly, when he was nearing the end of his life, Freud wrote that ‘a collection to which there are no new additions is really dead’. From time to time, Freud offered more or less pragmatic accounts of his passion for objects. ‘The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to the deepest most valuable treasures.’ But the occasional hints that he let drop were rather more revealing of the nature of his passion for collecting. Every time that he bought a new piece, it was placed on the dinner table, ‘in front of him, as a companion, during the meal’, he told his biographer Ernest Jones.

There is a hierarchy among collectors and collections, and it is not one that is necessarily based on the price that objects can command. To collect art is to place yourself at the top of the hierarchy. Even if some stamps can command prices that make them more valuable than many works of art, most stamp collectors would hesitate to suggest that the objects of their desire have more cultural significance than art. But stamp collecting is probably ahead of collecting cheese labels, biscuit tins or postcards. Or at least it was. Andy Warhol spent seventeen years of his life filling innumerable cardboard boxes in his New York town house with the detritus of everyday life. Every time he filled one, it was sealed, numbered, dated and shipped off to a store in New Jersey. At the time of his death, he had completed 610 boxes. They now sit in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. A team of archivists spent six years examining their contents and entering the results of their work into the museum’s database. A typical Warhol box has 400 objects in it, but some have as many as 1,200. Their contents range from a mouldering piece of Caroline Kennedy’s wedding cake to a mummified human foot belonging to an ancient Egyptian. There is a Ramones single signed by Joey Ramone. There are newspaper cuttings, letters from the famous (the poet Allen Ginsberg) and the obscure (the Warhol cousins). And there is much, much more than even the chaos of the boxes. Warhol left behind a town house crammed with his possessions. There were bags filled with antiques, clothes and books, the product of his daily shopping expeditions. One drawer held a collection of jewellery and another was stuffed full of banknotes. There were piles of furniture, fan mail, old soup tins, and his collection of thirty-seven silver wigs that he was in the habit of wearing two at a time. It is the kind of random accumulation that sanitation departments are sometimes called on to fumigate, in houses in which an agoraphobic recluse has died alone.

The power of Warhol’s name, and the resources of the Warhol Foundation - which spent $600,000 cataloguing and organizing the chaotic material from the boxes - has transformed a pile of junk into, whatever Warhol’s intentions were, what might either be a collection or a kind of artwork in its own right.

It is one example of many that could be seen as having toppled or inverted the collecting hierarchy. Art is at the top of the pyramid, and design, or decorative art as it was once called, is way down. If Warhol’s junk has intrinsic meaning, then why not the obsessions of outsider artists, or of Robert Opie, whose extensive packaging collection began with a discarded chocolate-bar wrapper picked up from the pavement, and which now fills an entire museum of brands in west London.

Art values, or, perhaps more accurately, art prices, are subject to a form of market-making that is shaped in much the same way that financial analysts rate corporate stock. The buyers mostly rely on the expert opinion of advisers who are not themselves purchasers. Neither financial analysts nor dealers are immune to fashion but the rhetoric is always of aesthetic achievement or fundamental financial indicators. In stamp collecting, it is rarity alone rather than beauty or technical prowess that attracts the premium. Of course rarity is an issue in art. Vermeer may or may not be an artist superior to Rembrandt, but there is much less of his work to go around and, as a result, he costs more.

Collecting is in one sense about remembering, but the digital world never lets us forget anything. Paradoxically, it has also undermined our ability to remember. Our employment prospects are haunted by our Facebook pages. Our email and text trails will last as long as the server farms that have already conferred a kind of immortality on anybody with a Twitter account,

But Google is costing us the use of our memory muscles, and, worse, we are losing the comfort that every previous generation has been able to take in its possessions. We are a society that owns more things than any other in history, but never have they been discarded so quickly. We are a species that is used to measuring out the passing of our lives through the marks and scratches, the dents and wear and tear on metal and wood, stone and leather. Dramatic or banal, they tell us about who we once were. We have an emotional need to pass things on. We remember our grandparents, and parents, through the things that they leave us. And we want to do the same with what we bequeath to our children. And yet the range of objects left to pass on is dwindling as digitalization takes over. There is an insidious and effective advertising campaign for a Swiss watch that shows a groomed and greying but still slender master of the universe with his adolescent, yet equally elegant, son. You never actually own one of these, you just look after it for the next generation, runs the strapline. This is, of course, an invitation to spend the price of a small car as a means of telling the time that is no more accurate or convenient than the average mobile phone But it is also a sharp reminder of what objects once meant and what we forlornly hope that they still might be. It’s not just the precious things that are the material means of carrying a memory. It used to be the anonymous things that we used every day.

The mobile phone is not just a watch substitute, it has abolished a whole lot of other objects. And very often it goes to landfill no more than nine months after it comes out of its glossy box, to make way for the next generation, which, as Morris’s law so accurately predicted, will be twice as powerful for half the price.

We are seeing technological change at unprecedented speed transforming the rituals of everyday life. There is no going back, the wristwatch hangs on a little desperately thanks only to the massive investment of the watch industry in advertising and marketing. But other objects that are usually seen as gifts to mark special events, such as the fountain pen or the clock, are on the verge of extinction. And a USB stick is not going to have the same resonance.

To judge by the number of collectors who transfer their energies apparently at random from contemporary furniture to Disney memorablia, from Wiener Werkstätte silver to suits of armour, it is not necessarily the object itself that is the primary attraction for them. Value can also serve to reflect the egotism of competition. When Yves Saint Laurent’s collection was auctioned in 2009, $19.4 million of the total $28 million paid was for an Eileen Gray armchair (the highest price paid for a work of twentieth-century design at auction). This can partly be explained by the rivalry between the two collectors bidding for it. Set against the cost of acquiring a complete Gray villa, it’s a price that makes no sense. But it is a reflection of another essential aspect of the collecting instinct, that relentless desire to possess an object and at the same time to deny possession of it to others. After accumulating wealth, affluence is no longer enough. To differentiate themselves one from another, the wealthy try to define themselves by the scale and quality of their collections.

Price is also a reflection of the patina of the individual history of an object. That it had once belonged to Saint Laurent could be seen to have an impact on the price, in a way in which Armand Hammer’s brief ownership of Leonardo’s papers does not. What price does not always do is reflect the inherent quality or interest of an object. With its ram’s horn arms, the most expensive piece of twentieth-century furniture ever made is certainly neither the most characteristic nor the most impressive of Gray’s designs, but for the pathological collector that is not always the point.

Orhan Pamuk’s remarkable novel The Museum of Innocence provides a more engaging insight into the psychology of collecting than a saleroom catalogue. At first reading, it appears to be the story of a doomed love affair between Kemal, the narrator, and Füsun, a young woman who, though she is his distant cousin, is represented as his social inferior. Pamuk uses their relationship as the underpinning for a miniaturist portrait of the society in which it took place: the Turkey of the 1970s. It’s a world of chauffeur-driven, vintage American cars kept running in the absence of more up-to-date replacements deterred by tariff walls. There are advertising hoardings adorned by imported blonde German models, a far-from-subtle cinema industry and venal gossip columnists. But it was also an Istanbul, as Pamuk describes it, that had mass-circumcision ceremonies arranged in poorer neighbourhoods for boys whose families could not afford them. It had dance halls and belly dancers, and certain streets ran with the blood of sheep sacrificed in huge numbers on holy days.

Pamuk studied architecture as a young man, and is still fascinated by the complex layers of urbanism in Istanbul. He brings both these elements to the book, alongside his exploration of collecting: a combination that I find particularly compelling.

Turkey had not yet fully come to terms with rapid modernization, a word which had particular resonance in the republic that Atatürk had built on militant secularism. Istanbul had its SOM-designed Hilton Hotel - in which a key scene in the novel is set. Perched on a hilltop, it was an architectural symbol of modernity, visible from across the city. Yet, it served as much to draw attention to Turkish ambivalence about modernity. Pamuk suggests it was one of the few places in Turkey that couples could register without producing a marriage certificate. This is all described in the novel in exquisite and affecting detail, while in the background the regular military coups, and the bombings of the period, are glimpsed from a distance, barely acknowledged by the characters who furnish the foreground.

Gradually, it emerges that the novel is not what it appears on the surface. From the opening of the book, Pamuk’s protagonist starts to measure out the course of his relationship in objects: the earring that Füsun loses when they are making love; the handbag that he buys for his fiancée, Sibel, from the shop in which Füsun works, and which he is embarrassed to discover may be a locally made copy of a French original. Pretty soon he is surreptitiously pocketing Füsun’s discarded cigarettes. Then, he starts to steal things from her parents’ home.

But Pamuk didn’t just explore the meaning of collecting in fictional terms in his novel, he built an actual collection, and a museum to accommodate it, in Beyoğlu, the area of Istanbul in which its Jewish, Greek and Armenian citizens lived until the collapse of the Ottoman empire. It was where the Sultan installed the trams, electric street lights and department stores that coexisted with an atrophied government system in the last years of the nineteenth century.

Pamuk’s book is in part a reflection on the nature of the museum as physical experience. It is also an account of what it means to collect. Pamuk identifies himself with his protagonist, and the solace that he finds in collecting. ‘I think that getting attached to objects happens in traumatic times, and love is a trauma. Perhaps when they are in trouble, people hoard things. People get attracted to objects. Hoarding reaches the level of collecting when there is a story that unites them.’

The novel reflects a collection that was built up over many years, both before and after Pamuk began writing it. Since his days in the flea markets and shops piled high with salvaged fragments of past lives, guarded by unshaven men, the digital world has transformed the way people collect. ‘Once you did it on foot, you had to walk. With the internet, you collect by finger, click, click, click,’ says Pamuk, leaping up and setting off on another of his brief tours of his entrance hall. ‘We may ridicule that, but the effect was that prices went up. People never collected used toothbrushes, people did not collect liquor bottles, but they did collect small miniature bottles. Key holders used to be collectibles, suddenly, they disappeared.’

Pamuk’s museum is not simply a literary device, nor is it only a species of art installation, though it could be seen as one. Installations do not, however, for the most part, come equipped with an operational fire exit. There is a director; there is a bookshop selling postcards and a range of art books; there is a ticket office; and there are security guards. A steady stream of visitors is prepared to pay the modest price of admission; free if you have purchased the book. Tickets are sold from a window that looks out on to the street: the door opens and visitors find themselves in the midst of a hollowed-out space that Pamuk compares to the Guggenheim spiral. Like the book, which appears to be a love story but is something else, so the museum only appears to be a museum of social and urban history.

Though both novel and installation give a remarkably resonant portrait of a complex city at a very particular moment in its long history, they are in fact an exploration of the nature of collecting and its obsessive character. And that is what sets the museum apart from any museum of civic life that it may superficially resemble. One entire wall of its entrance hall displays the 4,213 cigarettes that Füsun smoked from the day she first met Kemal until the termination of their relationship. Each cigarette is annotated in Pamuk’s handwriting, whose angular compression reveals his years as an architecture student. The cigarettes, of course, are elaborate fictions, or can perhaps be described as fakes. Even if there had been a real Füsun, she certainly did not smoke these particular cigarettes. But the handwriting is real enough.

Pamuk has made a museum that is far from innocent. He has worked with a skilful graphic design team to fabricate many items such as the label of the Turkish-made fizzy drink that features prominently in the novel, as well as the advertising featuring the glamorous German model. It looks utterly authentic, a loving evocation of a moment when sideburns had first sprouted in modern Turkey, but is as fictitious as the wall of cigarettes. The brand never existed. The book is no more innocent: Pamuk’s protagonist, Kemal, shares many of Pamuk’s own biographical details, but there is also a character named Orhan Pamuk, who takes on the narrative at the close of the book. Pamuk’s lovingly created mementos sit alongside artefacts which actually are old: wireless sets, bird cages, crockery, cutlery and matchbooks.

Pamuk tells me that he met the man who catalogued the Warhol boxes. But he is not convinced by them: ‘Warhol was so smart about organizing his own fame. I don’t see what he did as art. There is a difference between Warhol’s randomly collected objects, and the contents of the Museum of Innocence, they are not random,’ he says of his museum.