Monday, September 30, 2013

Larry’s list

Wow, that sounds interesting. Some German guy has set up a database ranking every art collector worldwide. How would you do a thing like that? Magnus Resch has done it by enlisting collector collectors. He calls them researchers and claims 25 of them in 20 countries including New Zealand (the usual OTN branded rewards for anyone who can tell us who is stalking NZ’s art owners). As you might imagine the ‘research’ comes with a large serving of random. Who knows why Magnus has called the result Larry’s List but he claims it has nothing to do with Larry G.

The list of NZ collectors (their initials anyway) is available on Larry’s List. It gives you a fairly good idea of how arbitrary and, yes let’s face it, stupid this idea is. In Auckland the two JGs are there (Gibbs and Gow) but no AG, RG or SG. You can find HD but where’s JW and AB? As for Wellington MB and JB are there (who ever the hell they are) but no sign of TF, SF or NMcG let alone AT or the other MB.

The NZ collectors, as represented by their initials, are:
Auckland: JG, RS, EC, WB, JG, JS, AS, AH, DR, RC, EC, JR, DM, CM, RH, FR, GR, NG, BP, HC and LM
Arrowtown: MH
Queenstown: SE
Wellington: MB, JB, DA, VA and PS
Canterbury: GG and LG
Nelson: KS and rather bizarrely that small suburb outside Nelson, Los Vegas: GS

You can check out the initial part of Larry’s List here or pay $10 a pop to dig deeper. 

Image: (while we’re on the subject of random) the best pic that came up when we put ‘new zealand collector’ into Google Images