. Market participant saturation and the inability to travel is often touted as the reason behind this pandemic-driven “retreat into the interior.”
This stock broker mentality to collecting is hardly anything new, but what the pandemic did was bring a flurry of new “arbitrageurs” into the art collecting hobby, and in a similar proportion to those that were deciding to cash out. Art stock had always been concentrated in the hands of a few art representatives and dealers, but now upstart middlemen had entered the already crowded picture.
A bad debt doesn’t just hang over you; it can become a part of the cycle of addictive behaviour that you require to experience the dizzying highs that diminish with each new acquisition . Climbing out of my hole afforded me a strange, rarefied pleasure of its own, and I discovered how abjection had its role to play in my compulsive buying. As I chipped away at what I owed, I felt that sordid little thrill more intensely – like anything was possible.
Oxygen addict.