Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Pushkin. LinkedIn will help connect you with professionals you can't find anywhere else, even people who aren't actively looking for a new job. In a given month, over 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other leading job sites. So if you're not looking at LinkedIn, you're looking in the wrong place.
Hire professionals like a professional and post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Gladwell. That's linkedin.com slash Gladwell to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.
The most innovative companies are going further with T-Mobile for Business. Red Bull harnessed the strength of the T-Mobile 5G network to launch point-of-view drones and give fans unmatched views of their extreme sports, while broadcasting in real time from some of the most remote locations in America. This is heart-pounding fan experiences. This is Red Bull with T-Mobile for Business.
Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. Starting today, if you don't live in New York State, you're going to have to pay a mandatory entrance fee to visit the Metropolitan Museum. Eyewitness News, ABC7 New York, March 1st, 2018.
The new policy was announced in January, but it took effect today. Adults who do not have ID proving that they live right here in New York have to pay $25. Seniors will pay $17. If I had to pinpoint the beginning of my obsession with art museums, it would be the moment the Metropolitan Museum, one of the greatest museums in the world, decided to impose entrance fees.
It was a difficult time for the institution. They had a $40 million deficit. They got rid of 90 employees. Exhibitions were canceled. There was a shakeup in the leadership. Up and down the Upper East Side of Manhattan, there was hand-wringing and a great gnashing of teeth. I remember one New York Times headline from that time. Is the Met Museum a Great Institution in Decline?
That was followed by one expression of anguish after another, including this from the former chairman of the Met's drawings and print department. To have inherited a museum as strong as the Met was 10 years ago with a great curatorial staff and to have it be what it is today is unimaginable. Well, exactly.
Because, for the life of me, I couldn't imagine how it was The Met was crying poverty. I mean, they have one of the largest and most valuable art collections in the world. 1.5 million objects. What's all that art worth? I don't know, a hundred billion dollars? More? The Met might be the richest non-profit institution in human history. All they would have to do is pick a couple things off the shelf and they'd never see a deficit again.
This is like Jeff Bezos firing the gardener because he's out of cash. Just go to the ATM, Jeff. But they couldn't do it. They would rather fire people and make a family of four cough up to $100 at the gate than even think of parting with a single one of their possessions. It's a puzzle. And it is for puzzles like this that we have revisionist history. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
This is our fifth season, five years of digression, high dudgeon, needless provocation, and my absolute favorite, Grand Unified Theories. In this season of Revisionist History, I want to explore our emotional attachment to objects and rituals and tradition, and the way in which those attachments betray us. And in this first episode, I would like to make sense of the strange relationship of the art world to art.
During his 31-year tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Felipe de Montebello, the Met's eighth and longest-serving director, guided the acquisition of more than 84,000 works of art. I found this in a video series called Great Museums, an episode from 2010, An Acquiring Mind. Lots of wide-angle shots of marble-floored galleries and gilt-framed paintings, and
NPR's Susan Stamberg narrates over what sounds like an orchestra right there on the set. Born in France, educated at Harvard, in 1963 de Montebello brought a background in European painting... The film runs for an hour. It's about the most famous director of the Met, Philippe de Montebello, descendant of a noble French family. In particular, it's about how much stuff Philippe de Montebello bought during his 31-year tenure as head of the Met.
Tapestries, African sculptures, a fabulous Vermeer, an evening gown that's to die for. He even bought things he didn't want to buy. Philippe has been an incredible director for supporting the acquisitions of objects of great quality from across the globe. It goes on and on about the acquiring, to the point where you wonder, or at least I wondered, wait, I thought you didn't have any money.
Today, nearly 2 million objects comprising an encyclopedic treasury of world art are contained in the Met's growing collection. Apparently, I was wrong in the numbers. Not 1.5 million objects, 2 million objects. Let me give you an example, maybe my favorite example, of this weirdness in the art world.
It has to do with a public hearing held in July of 1991 at the Financial Accounting Standards Board, better known as the FASB. The FASB is the Vatican of the American accounting profession, and this was one of the occasional open sessions the FASB holds in order to share with the broader American public subjects of grave concern to the accounting universe.
The venue was the FASB's Norwalk, Connecticut headquarters. The subject, accounting for contributions received and contributions made and capitalization of works of art, historical treasures, and similar assets. The room was packed. They videotaped the proceedings so people could watch in the overflow room.
I've read a transcript of the hearing, all 947 pages of it, and I would like to direct your attention to a particular exchange. It was between the then chairman of the FASB, Dennis Beresford, and a man named C. Douglas Dillon. Dillon was a tall man, gray suit, patrician, a certain stature.
He was former director of Dillon Reed & Co., the Wall Street firm founded by his father, and was possessed of maybe the greatest resume in mid-century America. U.S. Treasury Secretary for much of the 1960s, ambassador to France, chair of the Brookings Foundation, president of the Harvard Board of Overseers, a close friend of John Rockefeller III, a world-class collector of Impressionist art, and...
most relevant for the purposes of the hearing that day, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The American establishment sent its biggest gun to confront the FASB over the agency's proposal to change the rules surrounding the accounting for contributions received and contributions made and capitalization of works of art, historical treasures, and similar assets.
The accountants wanted the art world to follow the same accounting rules as other businesses. Dylan versus Dennis Beresford, chairman of the FASB, member of the American Accounting Hall of Fame and the Financial Executives International Hall of Fame. Way back on day one of the proceedings in question, Beresford had made it plain that he wasn't going to stand for any nonsense. So C. Douglas Dylan was restrained in his objections. Gracious.
I'm going to guess this was his first visit to Norwalk, Connecticut. The room must have been hushed, right? I mean, it's C. Douglas freaking Dillon. He does a little preamble, carefully explains how outraged the Met is at the intrusion of accountants into their business, launches into a vivid description of the extraordinary size of the Met's collection, and then, and this is maybe my favorite part of the entire 947-page transcript, Dillon says...
Quote, "We have a new curator of Islamic art, been with us for a couple years now. We have certainly the greatest collection of Islamic rugs in the Western hemisphere, one of the two or three in the world. He has never been able to even see that collection.
Because so much of it is in storage and is so difficult to get out. So costly and time-consuming that he knows by the records what they are, but he hasn't been able to look at them. C. Douglas Dillon is speaking to an audience of accountants. Accountants are people who like to count things. More than that, they are people who believe, as a matter of deep professional principle, that everything can be counted.
And they have proposed that the art world agree to start counting things like everyone else. And in response, this pillar of the American establishment shows up in suburban Connecticut and says, "We can't count our things. There's just too many of them. They're all buried somewhere in storage." To give you an example, the guy who was responsible for our Islamic rug collection, maybe the greatest Islamic rug collection in the world, mind you, has never even seen our Islamic rug collection.
I have to say, this is where the art world loses me. So I called up the staffer at the FESB who organized that hearing all those long years ago. His name is Ron Basio, just retired.
This is a good exercise for a 73-year-old to test the memory to go back almost 30 years now. I'm very impressed. Basio returned to his old offices at FASB headquarters to take my call so he would have access to the critical documents. So I'm just going to pull up the financial statements of the Metropolitan Museum, and I just want to very briefly walk through
I was just wondering if they could be Googled up here as well. He's on his computer. I'm on mine. We're downloading the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2019 annual report and locating the crucial part, the statements of financial position, beginning on page 44. I have cash, receivable for investments sold, retail inventories. These are all straightforward. Accounts receivable, straightforward.
Contributions receivable. That's the pledges. Financial statements for almost any organization look pretty much the same. You start by listing your assets, everything of value. Then you list your liabilities, loans, mortgages, pension obligations. Then you balance them. That's why it's called a balance sheet. Basio and I are going down the list of the Mets assets. Then there's investments, which I'm assuming is the endowment.
Could be endowment or it could be just investments in total. They may not all be part of the endowment. Then I have fixed assets, $393 million, and then I have collections and I have nothing. It's supposed to be a precise accounting of everything that Met has of value. The amount the museum made last year from selling stocks.
The amount of cash it has on hand, its endowment, the amount it's owed from various creditors, the amount it got in gifts and donations, even the value of the inventory in its gift shop. Everything. And they add it all up and they come up with a number: total assets. But next to the line item entitled "collections" — that is to say, the millions of unimaginably rare and precious art objects owned by the museum
The 18 Van Goghs, the 46 Picassos, the 20 Rembrandts. There is no dollar figure. Nothing. It's blank. All it says is, see note A. Okay, note A. Ah, here it is. Note A in the appendix. It says, Excluded.
This is a multi-billion dollar organization with billions and billions of dollars in art, and none of it is listed in their financial statement? I don't even understand how that started. Well, your reaction is similar to the reaction that some of our board members had. On top of that, it turns out that the Met would rather charge admission, cut exhibitions, and get rid of 90 people than sell anything.
Even though they have so many things like Islamic rugs that the guy running the Islamic rug collection hasn't even seen any of his Islamic rugs because they're all in storage somewhere. In fact, most of the Betts collection is in storage. Huge football field sized warehouses, presumably somewhere in New Jersey, full of stuff.
And when the FASB says, why don't you tell us, like a normal institution, just how much your stuff is worth? Because, I don't know, maybe it would be easier to think rationally about how to run things if you knew that fact. The Met goes crazy. Dispatches C. Douglas Dillon to Norwalk, Connecticut to say, never, not on my watch. We've never done that and we never will. Yeah, this is unlike any other business. You're supposed to carry assets at either book or market value.
and you're supposed to put them in your financial reports, and they don't. This is Michael O'Hare, who teaches in the business school at Berkeley. If you ask anyone, anyone, who knows their way around a balance sheet about the way museums record their assets, you get the Michael O'Hare response. I was talking about this at some conference, and somebody from an orchestra, some financial person from an orchestra, said, wait a minute, you mean you buy a painting and then it just disappears?
And that's what happens. There's an expense, and then that's the last we hear about it in the financial records. It's quite bizarre. For the longest time, I would bore everyone I met with how strange I found all this. Until one day, I was in Holland on my book tour, in Leiden, out with a bunch of people in a bar. And I told the group the story of the epic showdown between Dennis Beersford and C. Douglas Dillon.
And this one guy, a philosopher, said, oh, it's like Smaug. Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit, who sits on a mountain of treasure. Smaug doesn't want to use his gold. He doesn't wear it out to dragon social events. He does not list his holdings on his annual dragon financial statement. He just wants to hoard it. And I'm like, oh my God, Smaug. Yes, that explains everything. It was an old dragon under gray stone.
His red eyes blinked as he lay alone. His joy was dead and his youth spent. He was knobbed and wrinkled and his limbs bent in the long years to his gold chain. In his heart's furnace the fire waned. This is J.R.R. Tolkien reading his poem The Horde. To his belly's slime gems stuck thick. Silver and gold he would snuff and lick. To his belly's slime gems stuck thick. That's what happens when a dragon sits on his treasure for too long.
And the stuff that couldn't fit under his belly, the dragon has buried deep inside his lair in storage. Following that epiphany in the bar in Leiden, I resolved to perform a field test of the hypothesis that art museums are modern-day versions of the dragon's smog. This was a few months back. I was going to be in Pittsburgh for another reason anyway, so I decided to pay a visit to the Andy Warhol Museum.
the largest museum devoted to a single artist in North America. So I made an appointment with the museum's curator of art, Jessica Beck, and on a bright and cold morning in Pittsburgh, I headed out to the city's North Shore neighborhood to the beautiful old warehouse that holds the museum. I told Beck I didn't want to see just the collection, the art on the walls. I wanted to see everything. So Beck graciously took me upstairs to the archives.
We're just off the staircase. There were dozens of brown cardboard boxes stacked in neat piles. Oh, I see. Oh, they're like... They're covered in plastic and, you know, kept... Behind glass. Yeah. So this, again, is just a portion of them. There's a whole other portion. Wait, how many are here? Let's see. The cardboard boxes house what Warhol called his time capsules.
There are 610 of them in total. He would put things in these cardboard boxes, tape them shut, and set them aside. But he also had other boxes, idea boxes, what are called basement boxes. After Warhol died, everything was shipped to Pittsburgh in an armada of tractor trailers. The museum's best guess is that in their archive, they have at least 500,000 objects.
And so all the other boxes are behind that door. Yeah, the rest of them are back there. Yeah, but it's not something I can see. That I'm not sure. And I can ask, we can find out, because I wasn't sure. We found one of Warhol's time capsules that had been opened. It was on the counter, like a patient etherized upon a table.
We peered inside. So this is his 50s suit. 1956 Hong Kong. So his first trip to Asia. A lot of them are closed right now because we're sort of trying to figure out how to keep the objects from shifting. I was suddenly curious. I wanted to see inside one of the closed boxes. Bex said she didn't have the authority to open one up, but she made a few calls. Finally, she found someone.
Okay, we have someone that can open a box. Okay, let's go take a look. Another of the museum staff hurried towards us. This is John. Hi, John. Hi, how are you doing? I'm Malcolm. Hi, Malcolm, nice to meet you. So we were just going to peek into one just to get a sense of what they look like. I was explaining that a lot of things are in folders. So they're heavy. Yeah. They weigh 40 or 50 pounds in some cases. Mm-hmm.
John positioned himself in front of the box and began opening it up. His movements were assured, practiced.
So yeah, we treat the box itself like it's part of an object. So that's why I wear the gloves. So these would have been boxes that Andy would have his assistant store things in. We've taken the time to line the boxes with this folder type material so that the objects in the box do not touch the acidic cardboard of the original box.
And they're kind of packaged very, objects in here are packaged in a sort of a Tetris kind of way with folders that are marked and catalogued. So in its original form this stuff would have been... Just crammed in there. I wasn't sure what I was expecting to see in the box. Drawings, notes, makeshift sculptures, old canvases, the working life of an artist.
So this is a pretty cool one, a lenticular of the daisies. Did he make that, or is that just something he bought? That was probably something he bought. At best, he would have commissioned it to be made, but I think this was something that was purchased and then used as an inspiration for his later work. And you can smell it, right? Do you smell that? That's the object itself off-gassing. Mm-hmm.
The lenticular is one of those pieces of cardboard with an image on it that's printed in such a way that it looks like it has three dimensions. They're big with children. This one had flowers on it. Sometimes we find, like, notes, like, of Andy's intent, like, why he was collecting these, along with the objects that, you know, we consider sort of source material. Yeah. So he's got, like, six lenticulars in that. Yeah, in that top folder. Oh.
John continued digging deeper and deeper into the same box. We found an old movie scrapboard that once belonged to a fan somewhere. A bunch of 8x10 glossies of movie stars. Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Basile Ball. You want to go one more folder? Yeah, let's do one last folder. One last folder would be cool. We looked at a piece of what seemed like junk mail. An invite to an art opening. So we even keep the paper clips. I see.
Yeah. It's quite meticulous. Yeah. Everything is kept. John started whispering. It seemed appropriate. We were deep in the dragon's lair. Now, why are Andy Warhol's time capsules full of junk? Because he collected junk. Well, if you wanted to meet Andy Warhol, all you had to do in the 80s was go to the flea market.
the Sixth Avenue flea market. I'm in New York talking with Simon Doonan, writer, fashionista. In fact, I just word-searched flea market in the Warhol Diaries, and it comes up about 12 times because he's always going to, coming from, blah, blah, blah. I've known Simon ever since he wrote a book called Eccentric Glamour years ago, which included chapters on Simone de Beauvoir, Tilda Swinton, the supermodel Imane,
And me, which remains the most preposterously inaccurate but nonetheless deeply flattering thing anyone has ever written about me. I love Simon Doonan.
Anyway, back in the day, Simon knew Andy Warhol and the flea market where he hung out. It was a protean flea market. It kept growing, expanding, retreating. Anytime there was a new lot available, the flea market expanded. And it was a significant social scene. Like, I remember seeing Catherine Deneuve there. And it was just a...
We were in Simon's apartment, an impossibly chic warrant of rooms.
I could walk you around and show you many things that Jonathan and I, or I myself, bought at the Sixth Avenue flea market. That bust of Michael Jackson, which people think is a Jeff Koons, was 10 bucks at the flea market. People really think it was a Jeff Koons. Yeah. Have you told Jeff Koons?
Simon Doonan found treasure at the flea market. Everyone did. But Warhol treated his treasure a little differently. When Andy Warhol died, it emerged that he had not unpacked most of this stuff that he'd gotten at the flea market. There were these stories, I think, in Vanity Fair about his house packed with shopping bags that he'd gotten there.
at the flea market when he bought his Russell Wright china he collected. He collected those cookie jars. Famously, he would buy those Toycher chocolates. He was obsessed with them, but he would chew them and spit them out, you know, because he was always very concerned about keeping his...
trim little figure. So the idea that he collected these big sort of rotund cookie jars to be stuffed with cookies, it's kind of hilarious because he was sort of, you know, always very conscious of his figure.
Andy Warhol was a hoarder. All the classic symptoms. Simon Doonan used to head up the window dressing department at Barney's, and he famously did an homage to Warhol after his death, entitled The Compulsive Collector. We took the mannequin, dressed him in jeans, the blue blazer, turtleneck, and then I just went and bought one of those tacky Warhol wigs that you could get at the Halloween store. And I was like,
put the glasses on him, and instantly it became Andy, to the point where Pat Hackett, who wrote the Warhol diaries, was sort of, you know, skipping down 7th Avenue and screeched to a halt, and she banged on the window. She said to me, I nearly had a heart attack. I thought Andy had come back from the dead. I can show you the window. Here, here, here.
Simon brought out a book filled with pictures of his most famous windows. Oh, this is fantastic. This is fantastic. You can see it looks just like him. It's just like him. And all around the mannequin was stuff, the exact same kind of stuff that later found its way into the boxes at the Warhol Museum. The definition of a collector is someone who collects objects discriminately, someone who selects and chooses. But as Simon so nicely put it, Andy Warhol was a compulsive collector.
His collecting was indiscriminate. And what happens when he dies and his indiscriminate collection passes into the hands of a museum? They don't edit it or streamline it. They keep it exactly as it was, hidden away behind locked doors.
The Warhol Museum is an indiscriminate collection of an indiscriminate collection. The special thing about it, I think, is that it feels like it could be detritus in any other situation, right? Like remains of a day. Like there's, you know, the flight kit you would get on a first-class international flight, like the slippers, the vomit bag, the silverware from that international flight, like in one of the time capsules. So it's this, like...
sense of Warhol when you're with the material, but then again, it's not, you know? I mean, we even have the box after he died
at the hospital of his clothing and his final effects that were left at the hospital. We have that box preserved as it was picked up from the hospital. So it had his jacket in it that he wore to the hospital for that final visit, the backpack exactly how it was packed. So it has like all of his glasses and the business card for his doctor in the front pocket.
Now, I don't mean to pick on the Warhol Museum. This is what all art museums do. During his tenure running the Met, Philippe de Montebello acquired 84,000 objects, the overwhelming majority of which were packed away in boxes and sent to storage in New Jersey, never to be seen again. That's not any different from the mountain of detritus in cardboard boxes upstairs at the Warhol Museum.
Somewhere in the United States, there are twin brothers. I don't know precisely where they live, but in a big city. Can you just describe them? They're not married, I take it. They're not married. The psychologist Randy Frost, who worked closely with them for some time, refers to them as Alvin and Jerry, both pseudonyms. Born into a wealthy family, childhood prodigies, rumpled suits and bow ties. These are two people I really liked intensely.
I'm quoting now from Frost's account of the case from a book he co-authored called Stuff.
They had no pathways between all of their stuff. You stepped over things as you walked. Some of the piles were six feet high. On top of the art were clothes everywhere, and papers, business cards, bits of junk. ♪
They were lovely, they were intense in what they did. They had this kind of bond as twins, but tension at the same time. Fascinating, fascinating characters and really very interested in this phenomenon for themselves. This phenomenon meaning hoarding. Frost began to study hoarding behaviors with the assumption that they sprang from the same place as obsessive-compulsive disorders.
But the more he worked with hoarders, the more he became convinced that description didn't fit. OCD behavior is about the catastrophic reaction to an intrusive thought. And those intrusive thoughts are negative. Danger, threat, contamination. But so much of hoarding appeared to be the opposite. It appeared to be about pleasure. One of the brothers, Alvin, would come home for lunch nearly every day just to be among his things. Not to organize, but to enjoy things.
Frost would go with him on some of those visits, and Alvin would walk through the chaos, pick up random objects, and describe the story behind each one of his treasures. Look at this, Doctor. His voice rose with excitement as he found a ring. The ring, he thought, was from Western India. It was huge, almost the size of a walnut. It's that lovely scene in the book when you're walking through Alvin's apartment with him, and he's picking up objects. Yeah, yeah. But many of those objects...
have genuine value. Many of them did. Some of them didn't. Some of them did. And it reminded me a little bit of Andy Warhol because he collected things in this way and things with immense value and things of no value and put them all into these treasure chests. Yeah, yeah.
Was Alvin aware? He must have been aware intellectually of what was marketplace valuable and what was not. Yes, yes. It's just that it was all a value to him. It was all value to him. Yeah, yeah. And he had no desire...
He didn't want to show off his treasures in any way. No. Frost says that the impulse to hoard has three motivations. One is instrumental, that is, I might need it someday. The other is emotional, that is, this emotional connection with another person or event or something. And the third is aesthetic, this idea of the beauty of the physical world. The second of those ideas, the emotional one, Frost describes as the Proust effect.
from the famous passage in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. He's eating this cookie, and all of a sudden it brings him back to his childhood when his aunt used to make these cookies for him, and he remembers the way it felt. The phenomena is like hearing a song from your childhood. What started to dawn on me was that with people with this problem, these objects...
form that kind of experience in a much more intense way than everybody else. So somehow these objects are keys to these visceral memories that get produced. So finding something
anything, some token, some memento, anything that from your past triggers a much more vivid recollection than in the rest of us. Than for the rest of us. Yes. And it is a recollection. Hold on. That's such a fascinating notion. So you mentioned music. So most of us would have it, you know, there are songs if you play them. Yes. Have that thing for me.
"Yas, Only You." I don't know why that song doesn't ring, but I can imagine. So what you're saying is that feeling I have with "Yas, Only You," only with a box of matches or a playbill or a... Absolutely, yes. Yes. One of Frost's patients was a woman who couldn't throw away a Disney blanket that her daughter had loved as a small child. Because she feels like if she throws it away,
She will lose the memories associated with that blanket and she will lose that piece of history, her personal history. And if she throws away too much, there's nothing left of her. For another patient, it was one of those ATM cash envelopes from five years ago. There was no cash in it. She spent the cash that was in it. But on the back, she'd written how she spent it. And it wasn't anything unusual, grocery store, drugstore, a few other items.
She put it in the recycle box and she started to cry. And she said, "It feels like I'm losing that day in my life. And if I lose too much, there'll be nothing left of me." There'll be nothing left of me. One of the twin brothers, Alvin, was a successful event organizer. He once told Frost that he had lost a folder containing his notes from something he'd organized.
And even though the event was recent, every memory he'd had of it was gone. And when he found the folder again, his memories returned. If your mind works that way, why would you ever throw away that folder? Most people would look at this and see a mess, he told Frost on one of their visits to his penthouse. And then he said, really, it's layered and complex.
When you got them away from there, from the subjective,
hoarding and away from their apartments. I mean, what were they like? Oh, they were fun. They were fascinating. They knew something about everything. They were both delightful, delightful people. If you talk to a layperson, they would probably think of hoarding as a kind of mental illness, I'm imagining. It's not a mental illness. It's not a deficit that affects all aspects of your functioning. Yeah.
The way I describe it sometimes is a form of giftedness. There's a gift associated with this, an appreciation for the physical world, an appreciation for the emotional experience that's associated with objects. And that gift, unfortunately, comes with a curse. And the curse is not being able to manage it. The hoarder is someone with the unusual ability to see beauty in the ordinary.
Which is exactly the point that Simon Dunham made about Andy Warhol. The nicest aspect of him was that he was very democratic. Example, he said, if everyone's not a beauty, then nobody is. Oh, that's kind of lovely. It's fabulous. That's why he thought these drag queens, you know, Jackie Curtis and Hollywood lawn, were not objectively beautiful.
Sophia Loren, but he saw beauty and magic and madness in them, you know. You know what, but Simon, that is the perfect illustration of the particular condition, wonderful condition of the hoarder who applies that same logic to objects. If every object is not a
is not beautiful, then no object is. Right? It's exactly the same. Like some crappy old broken toy is the same as an Arnaud Vaux vase that your grandmother left you. Yeah, exactly. That's the... Oh my God. That's haunting. It is, isn't it? Haunting. And it's why the Warhol Museum keeps all of Warhol's boxes, because they have the same condition that Warhol had.
They have to insist on the meaning and beauty in all of that ephemera. They're the Warhol Museum. And like the hoarder, they worry that if they get rid of any of his stuff, they'll lose their connection to him. And can they count that stuff up and put a value on it? No. Because to the hoarder, everything is of equal value. So you get into these debates, they get esoteric sometimes.
But, you know, standard setting, eventually the board says, all right, we got to get to closure. We got to make a decision. We can't just go on forever. Ron Basio, my guide to the hearing of the FASB in 1991, when C. Douglas Dillon appeared in Norwalk, Connecticut, and stood up before the Vatican of Accounting and said, we cannot tell you what we have in our collections. That is not the way our imaginations are wired. And the Vatican backs down.
The accountants realize that this is a battle they cannot win, with the result that on virtually every American art museum balance sheet, there is some version of Note A. In conformity with accounting policies generally followed by art museums, the value of the museum's collections has been excluded from the statement of financial position. When the moon was new and the sun young, of silver and gold the gods sang.
In the green grass lay silver spilled, and the white waters lay with gold filled. In Tolkien's poem The Horde, everyone who desired the treasure dies in the end, but the treasure remains, buried deep in giant warehouses in New Jersey. There is an old hoard in a dark rock, forgotten behind doors none can unlock. That grim gate no man can pass. On the mound grows the green grass.
Revisionist History is produced by Mia Lobel and Lee Mangistu, with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton, and Anna Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flan Williams. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson.
Special thanks to the Pushkin crew, Hedda Fane, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course, El Jefe, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.
and not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you. LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year.
On August 29th, Sauron has returned. Prime Video invites you to return to Middle-earth for the epic new season. Sauron will fall. You can't kill me. War is coming to Middle-earth.
I will not stop until he is destroyed. Every soul is in peril. Shall we begin? The Lord of the Rings. The Rings of Power. New season, August 29th. Only on Prime Video.