Is Flipping more Moral than Collecting?

[Chespirito]

wow..I am starting to think there is clicks here....I thought we were all in the same team..a home away from home...

[TupennyConan]

Now, have the large auction houses created the current high grade market by manipulating us all: collectors, flippers, collector/flippers, flipper/collectors, flipper~c um~collector, collector~cu m~flipper, Roy's funeral, public libraries, COI's contraband, KoR's butt cheek pick-up sticks thing, & Tupenny's dadgum doppelganger?

 

Have they, by design & device, created the market & created the creatures we have become?

 

[Sal]

boy, cum collecting doesn't sound like a hobby i'd like to be a part of. different strokes, i guess

[dover]

Now, have the large auction houses created the current high grade market by manipulating us all: collectors, flippers, collector/flippers, flipper/collectors, flipper~c um~collector, collector~cu m~flipper, Roy's funeral, public libraries, COI's contraband, KoR's butt cheek pick-up sticks thing, & Tupenny's dadgum doppelganger?

 

Have they, by design & device, created the market & created the creatures we have become?

 

17 pages and we come to the real question.

 

can someone be taken advantage of without their consent? and generally speaking, ignorance is not a defense allowed in court.

[TupennyConan]

boy, @@ collecting doesn't sound like a hobby i'd like to be a part of. different strokes, i guess

 

This post is like message board dunnage.

[TupennyConan]

Now, have the large auction houses created the current high grade market by manipulating us all: collectors, flippers, collector/flippers, flipper/collectors, flipper~c um~collector, collector~cu m~flipper, Roy's funeral, public libraries, COI's contraband, KoR's butt cheek pick-up sticks thing, & Tupenny's dadgum doppelganger?

 

Have they, by design & device, created the market & created the creatures we have become?

 

17 pages and we come to the real question.

 

can someone be taken advantage of without their consent? and generally speaking, ignorance is not a defense allowed in court.

 

[BrianR]

boy, collecting doesn't sound like a hobby i'd like to be a part of. different strokes, guess

 

This post is like message board dunnage.

 

 

Masking like that can lead to a moderator's wrath.

[TupennyConan]

boy, collecting doesn't sound like a hobby i'd like to be a part of. different strokes, guess

 

This post is like message board dunnage.

 

 

Masking like that can lead to a moderator's wrath.

 

He's lucky that no one is reading this thread, especially not the mods.

[thirdgreenham]

boy, collecting doesn't sound like a hobby i'd like to be a part of. different strokes, guess

 

This post is like message board dunnage.

 

 

Masking like that can lead to a moderator's wrath.

 

He's lucky that no one is reading this thread, especially not the mods.

 

 

Andy aka cgcmod4

[dover]

Now, have the large auction houses created the current high grade market by manipulating us all: collectors, flippers, collector/flippers, flipper/collectors, flipper~c um~collector, collector~cu m~flipper, Roy's funeral, public libraries, COI's contraband, KoR's butt cheek pick-up sticks thing, & Tupenny's dadgum doppelganger?

 

Have they, by design & device, created the market & created the creatures we have become?

 

17 pages and we come to the real question.

 

can someone be taken advantage of without their consent? and generally speaking, ignorance is not a defense allowed in court.

 

 

[TupennyConan]

Two-Pennies aren't enough. Many will remember MultiPenny. What I'm talkinbout.

 

[Chespirito]

Woow..I love all those guys' shoes...are they Reeboks?

[Timmay]

Two-Pennies aren't enough. Many will remember MultiPenny. What I'm talkinbout.

 

 

[COI]

Tupenny can dunk - very impressive.

[TupennyConan]

It was a caffe called Laguna Morte. Inside were Andre Tancredi and some artist friends, and as it happened the topic under discussion was Scarsdale Vide, as the latest in a series of American millionaires who had come to Venice with designs against Venetian art.

 

"The newspapers like to call it 'spoils of war,' " declared Tancredi, "as if it is only some metaphorical struggle, with large dollar sums replacing casualty figures...but out of everyone's sight and hearing, the same people carry on a campaign of extermination against art itself." Even with Kit's Italian on the sketchy side, he recognized this as passion, and not the usual coffeehouse eyewash.

 

"What's wrong with Americans spending money on art?" objected a piratically bearded youth named Mascregna, "macche, Tancredi. This town was built on buying and selling. Every one of those Great Italian Paintings sooner or later has had a price tag. The grand Mr. Vibe isn't stealing anything, he's paying a price both sides have agreed on."

 

"It's not the price tag," Tancredi cried, "it's what comes after -- investment, reselling, killing something born in the living delirium of paint meeting canvas, turning it into a dead object, to be traded, on and on, for whatever the market will bear. A market whose forces are always exerted against creation, in the direction of death. What Mr. Vibe needs is trouble he cannot pray himself out of."

 

~~ from Pynchon's anarchist romance, Marxist fantasy novel Against the Day.

[Theagenes]

i would not call flipping immoral, but saying that collecting is somehow less moral is crazy. morality shouldn't even come into it unless you are robbing comic stores to fill your runs. (or pressing ). i think either way is perfectly fine. i buy my books to read and keep. sometimes when i find out one has shot up in value i am tempted to sell it, but i usually don't. i'm keeping my tmnt collection vol.1 even though i see them sell on ebay for 4x what i paid just a few months ago. if i did sell it though, i wouldn't be hurting anybody

 

of course collecting is less moral. collecting is gathering items of like kind and keeping them somewhere away from the public. Keeping things away from the public is hiding, hoarding, gathering and putting under lock and key; freezing property and assets. Once assest and property begin to be kept in the vaults of the world by the elite of society, the divide between the haves and have nots grows. Everyone that keeps thier collections to themselves is denying the public of the ability to enjoy and share the "property". Why do collectors hate people? Why? Conversely, people that flip comics are continually bringing to market "new" and "fresh" material to be enjoyed again and again. Flipping should be called "sharing", collecting could be better termed as selfish and self centered hoarding of public assests.

 

Is there really any debate here?

 

 

Of course there is a real debate here.

 

Nicholas Brisbane has done excellent work in defining, defending, and explaining the importance of the collector to Western Society. Without the collector, he argues, there would be no/many less great works of art for future generations. It is the collector who has the insight, the passion and zeal and the resources to pursue material that libraries, museums and other institutions are ill euipped and short sighted to do. Libraries have been as desctructive of early primary source material as they have been protectors, and many of the great works of antiquities were in much better hands in private collections, than in public libraries.

 

The Library may be the great equalizer when it comes to education (to steal from Asimov and Franklin) but it is no friend to source material.

 

Another author of note who makes a compelling case for the hoarder is Thomas Cahill, with his provacative, but no less true, "How the Irish Saved Civilization" defending the merits of hoarding, hiding, collecting, for the sake of preservation of great cultures.

 

Public libraries are quite possibly the most immoral vetige of hammer and sickle, that our society keeps in plain sight. To think that an organization would offer objects and information, free of charge is sick. I tell you now, that morality is in the FLIP.

 

Look I'm not so quick to dismiss this thoughtful contribution to the thread.

 

However, observe that the collector's hoard as cultural repository projects us into the futurist's province, telescopes the here and now tangible morality of the flip forward in time on a gamble (drawing with it an element of risk akin to mortgage theory), and is nothing more than an attempt at archaeological wish fulfillment.

 

Ask Theagenes if all that goes in the ground comes back out of it.

 

 

Very little certainly. I think many of us do like to think of ourselves as caretakers of pop culture artifacts, myself included, but not only is that archaeological wish fulfillment, but is it also a false understanding of what an archaeologist or archivist is all about. It's not the artifact itself that is important, but the information that can be gleaned from the artifact.

 

The idea that collectors of antiquities have somehow protected and preserved culture is self-deluding nonsense. The creation of a market for antiquities has fueled the wholesale looting and destruction of archaeological sites around the world for centuries. This is something I deal with all the time. An artifact ripped out of its context, berift of its provenience, is essentially useless to someone trying to piece together the puzzles that are past cultures. It is just a pretty, shiny thing to put in a display case. The mindset of the looter, driven by the mentality of the collector tends to be driven by the monetary value of the objects obtained, rather than their historical or cultural value. Thus, the tiny gourd seed that may represent the beginning of horticulture is destroyed or displaced by the looter looking for that Archaic stemmed point he can sell on eBay for 50 bucks.

 

But does this discussion really have any relationship to a mass-produced, widely available object like a comic book? Not usually. Most of the common books have been reprinted or scanned into digital form. The information has been preserved - so what happens to actual object is irrelevant from a cultural resource management point of view. Flipping or hoarding - it doesn't really matter. Neither is moral or immoral when it comes to most comic books.

 

Only comics that are very rare or haven't been reprinted truly rise to level of something that we should perhaps think of as a cultural resource.

[TupennyConan]

The historian, literary scholar, & other such academics might appreciate the information gleaned from within the four corners of a textual object such as an unearthed Dead Sea Scroll, Nag Hammadi text, or really rare Centaur (those are really rare GA books, right? beats me), as opposed to the archaeologist in search of context & the larger picture beyond the artifact.

 

Text vs. context. How fun.

[Theagenes]

Very true - in those rare instances where original texts are themselves artifacts, the objects may have more intrisic value to the historian than their context. I would add the Oxyrhynchus Papryri and the texts being reconstructed from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. That's not to say context isn't important. The location nature of the Dead Sea Scroll cache (hidden away in a cave), for example, gives us a little insight into what was going on during the Jewish Revolt against Rome.

[dover]

is Indiana Jones a flipper or collector?

[TupennyConan]

is Indiana Jones a flipper or collector?

 

Sitting in the ER all night with a seriously ill little one & Dover still has time for this kinda post.