"Consumo en lugar de recepción". Reflexión sobre la motivación del comprador de arte.

The second answer, conversely, reveals art collectors to represent a generation that North American philosopher Jeremy Rifkin analysed in his book Access (2000). According to the author, the richest person is not he who has amassed more material goods, but he who has access to the greatest amount of information and experiences and is capable of experiencing sensations in different worlds. Even when collectors, thanks to the paintings, sculptures or videos purchased, are, ultimately, acquiring the right to access private viewings and perhaps even workshops, what they are really guaranteeing is a whole manner of perceiving and conceiving a world that is inaccessible to many. Collectors can invite an artist round for supper and get a glimpse of a world that is foreign to them. They can participate in points of view, attitudes and temperaments which they hope will provide personal enrichment -or perhaps just a pleasant exchange.

For those collectors who support personal contact with artists, art is a way of life that is characterised by spontaneity, a certain degree of audacity and a touch of passion. They would readily let themselves be infected by the artist's creativity, but they are also satisfied to simply observe the artist in a club or venue surrounded by an atmosphere that they see as a genuine source of inspiration. Collectors consume this atmosphere in which they can breathe a certain air of secrecy and promise. Naturally, at times, the type of admiration with which a collector approaches an artist is sentimental and slushy, and may even sometimes go beyond the limits of appropriation. Nevertheless, it is precisely at that moment that they appear as exclusive experiences and interests. In comparison, the material possession of the work of art is inconsequential.

This is not the only aspect that identifies some art collectors as the prototypes of post-materialistic consumers. In the end, the reason why most of these persons have chosen the art sector to unleash their collector spirit is precisely because they expect art to provide them with more sense or spiritual enrichment than any other thing they can buy. Art is purchased less than articles manufactured by high quality brands, which also promise to satisfy the spiritual desires of the purchaser, given their usefulness. Art attracts the attention of persons who have already satisfied all their specific and common needs, who can only feel an interest in something more "elevated," given its transcendence or lucidity, given a special discovery or a unique intensity. Just as art can be considered the model used by the most developed brands -since art was the first to grant priority to spiritual enrichment-, collectors can also be seen as the embodiment of a type of consumer that stems, to a certain extent, from the welfare society. The important aspect for collectors is to use their money to purchase the greatest amount of spiritual offers, which must also be different and long-lasting. Thus they attempt to live a happier and more satisfactory life than their less prosperous peers.

Art collectors cannot be categorized as especially "advanced" simply for demonstrating more liberal reception techniques or consumer-based motivations, aspects that are, in themselves, paradigmatic of a post-materialistic culture. Instead they give notice of, for the first time, an inversion or disruption that could be characteristic of a completely developed consumer society: the consumption of goods has a better consideration than their production. Proof of this appears, not in the collectors' behaviour, but in their actual presentation before the public opinion. Ultimately, art collectors obtain the respect they seek merely because they consume art in large quantities. For some time now, at least in the German-speaking region, no art magazine, newspaper or weekly misses the opportunity to provide their readers with issues that relate the stories of art collectors. Collectors can definitely relax in the know that they have a wide and benevolent audience. They are interviewed on issues that have nothing to do with their collections and they are allowed to organise visits to museums and they are even authorised to lecture. Collectors already have more glamour and personality than the directors of museums, critics and art curators. Their sole competition, in equal conditions, is the community of artists, in terms of the attention they can attract. Nevertheless, the prestige artists enjoy is precisely based on the fact that they are considered "original creators," which is, in other words, a more distinguished version of "producers."

Meanwhile, queries have started to appear on the subject of whether artists can satisfy the demand of the productive elite, since many of them have stopped worrying about the evolution of their own work and adopted a receptive and consumer attitude. Following the tradition imposed by "ready-mades," they turn to pre-existing material, they work with found footage or they select a sketch from a series of images and adapt it again or extract different examples. Therefore, philosopher and art critic Boris Groys defended the theory that artists have turned into the avant-garde of consumption, going from appearing as clear examples of the art producer to models of the consumer.

However a certain inversion also appears in this aspect: it seems that art collectors want to claim greater recognition for that particular form of consumption, even more so than the artists themselves. Whilst artists can become, at most, especially crafty consumers -if they discover something relatively futile and call it a work of art or if they manage to transform it into art-, collectors are able to attract attention to themselves as consumers in two different ways. In the first scenario some of their pieces' value increases considerably, immediately making them the embodiment of the successful bargain hunter. In fact, hardly any collector story excludes the tale of sensational price increases, as in the case of the photography collector L. Fritz Gruber: "Everything that is expensive and excellent today is what nobody wanted in the past." It seems that the best collectors are the fastest, and consequently they are also the avant-garde of consumption. In the second, collecting is valued as something akin to heroic merit, since great sums of money are involved. Thus, the collector appears as a person who is committed and willing to make sacrifices, i.e. a sensational consumer. Collectors devote themselves and their fortune to consumption.

This arouses a great deal of respect and curiosity, since the collector acts in an especially sensitive field: who can assert they have the necessary competence and good taste when it comes to modern or contemporary art? Collectors do not only spend a lot of money, they also pay for something, a work of art, which would fill a great number of people with dread. Not many people can bring themselves to make this kind of decision, even when dealing with small amounts of money. Therefore art collectors also think they are capable of knowing exactly what they want in all spheres of life: a person who can control the art world will not find it difficult to appear as the king of consumption in any other sector. In this sense, it is not surprising to hear so much said and with so much admiration about art collectors. They have something that a consumer society like ours sees as a virtue and an ideal: the knowledge and capacity to find something that, in exchange for money, provides great satisfaction. They stand as the heroes and models to be followed in a culture where identity is based on consumption.