The Trash Museum, is housed on the second floor of the Sanitation Department garage on East 99th Street, and it now features more than a thousand paintings, posters, photographs, musical instruments, toys, and other ephemera. (Location 337)
Don’t feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy. (Location 351)
Close your eyes and imagine you’re a wealthy collector who’s just entered a gallery in an art museum. On the wall facing you there are two gigantic canvases, each more than 10 feet tall. Both paintings depict a harbor at sunset. From across the room, they look identical: the same ships, the same reflections on the water, the same sun at the same stage of setting. You go in for a closer look. You can’t find a label or a museum tag anywhere. You become obsessed with the paintings, which you nickname Painting A and Painting B. You spend an hour going back and forth from canvas to canvas, comparing brushstrokes. You can’t detect a single difference. Just as you go to fetch a museum guard or someone who can shed light on these mysterious twin masterpieces, the head curator of the museum walks in. You eagerly inquire as to the origins of your new obsessions. The curator tells you that Painting A was painted in the 17th century by a Dutch master. “And what of Painting B?” you ask. “Ah yes, Painting B,” the curator says. “That’s a forgery. It was copied last week by a graduate student at the local art college.” Look up at the paintings. Which canvas looks better now? Which one do you want to take home? Art forgery is a strange phenomenon. “You might think that the pleasure you get from a painting depends on its color and its shape and its pattern,” says psychology professor Paul Bloom. “And if that’s right, it shouldn’t matter whether it’s an original or a forgery.” But our brains don’t work that way. “When shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it—how much they like it, how valuable it is—is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.” (Location 377)
In their book, Significant Objects, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker recount an experiment in which they set out to test this hypothesis: “Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.” First, they went out to thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales and bought a bunch of “insignificant” objects for an average of 1.25anobject.Then,theyhiredabunchofwriters,bothfamousandnot−so−famous,toinventastory“thatattributedsignificance”toeachobject.Finally,theylistedeachobjectoneBay,usingtheinventedstoriesastheobject’sdescription,andwhatevertheyhadoriginallypaidfortheobjectastheauction’sstartingprice.Bytheendoftheexperiment,theyhadsold128.74 worth of trinkets for $3,612.51. “To (Location 390)
Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple. (Location 551)
