First, a brief(ish) history of why we should care about rich people and their roles as tastemakers beyond the usual Freudianisms about fathers and fecal retention. The studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro at Urbino, finished in 1476, is a small room lined with trompe-l'oeil intarsia woodwork depicting shelves of books, instruments, armour, a lute, an open mazzocchio, dozens of illusory objects associated with talent and taste. The point was to allow Federico to stage a self, the self being staged one organised around humanist learning, military virtue, and divine order. Later, the Wunderkammern of the northern courts would work the same logic at a larger scale; coral next to astrolabes next to narwhal horn next to fossils, a microcosmic manifestation of the natural and scientific universe. The point of these collections was to prove that you, Rich Person (and I say person here, not Man, because wealthy European women collected just as much as their male counterparts), understood the world, that God's creation made sense to you in particular.

The Grand Tour of the eighteenth century refined this into something more explicitly class-producing. The British aristocrat who returned from Italy with his Poussins and antique casts and notebooks full of architectural sketches (and probably some STDs from a Venetian rentboy to boot) was demonstrating a worldly formation by proving that he had stood in front of the correct things and been correctly changed by them, that he has absorbed the Antiquarian tradition through the lens of a modern, educated man. The country house gallery was the permanent record of this transformation – think Holkham Hall, where Thomas Coke spent six years on the Tour and came back with the paintings and sculptures that literally determined the architecture built to contain them, or Charles Townley, whose Westminster townhouse became so dense with Roman marbles that Zoffany painted him sitting inside the collection itself, surrounded by busts and friezes rather than dogs or wives. The collection was the man.

The Victorian period brought further anxieties because the people with money had changed. The industrial families arriving into the landed classes brought something the old gentry didn't have and couldn't replicate: factories. And so the landed gentry, unnerved by the ‘nouveau riche’ suddenly having just as much if not more money than them, responded by collecting the unreplicatable. Taxidermy, which I wrote a terrible dissertation about in my early twenties, is the example that I continue to cling to. A stuffed Bengal tiger in the entrance hall of an estate in Wiltshire is, among other things, a direct argument against mechanised production. A factory cannot make this, only the land can. The Islamic tiles of Elveden Hall, the Japanese ceramics of Nostell Priory, the Mughal arabesques of Sezincote, the Orientalist interiors of Leighton House were all saying, I am connected to the world in a way that predates and exceeds the production line. (It was also, obviously, a colonial argument, the idea that the world's beauty belongs to us because the world belongs to us.)

All of this to say: collection is an ideological self-portrait. Objects are chosen because they mean the right things about the person who chose them. The collector is always, as Bourdieu puts it, consecrating themselves. He argued in Distinction (1979) that the aesthetic preferences of the dominant class (what he calls "legitimate culture") are not actually expressions of some innate, genuine refinement but are arbitrary historical formations that have been reified into universality. They are declared natural, inevitable and correct by the very institutions (universities, museums, criticism, the academy) that the dominant class also controls. High culture is called high because calling it so serves power, something (and I know this will upset a lot of people) Timothy Chalamet was entirely correct to point out.