The Passionate Collector
Some Call It Obsession
Little kids can be a pretty fixated bunch, just ask any parent who's had to sit through the same episode of Conrad the Conductor and the Sympathy Symphony over and over and over and over and over. When you're young, these intense fascinations are seen as an integral part of learning to focus on and categorize the world. But when you're an adult and you collect your favorite film on Blu-ray, DVD, VHS, Betamax and LaserDisc, they just call you obsessed.
24-Plex Home Cinema
From CinemaScope to Thrillarama, 23 cinema film formats were introduced in the 1950s alone. Fortunately for collectors (or unfortunately?) studios didn't re-release films in each new format.
But museums aren't any different. They get the legitimization of being public institutions, and they're supposed to track down, catalog, painstakingly restore and show off their collections. When we do it, we're obsessed, but when they do it it's called culture.