FIVE THINGS: MICHAEL CRICHTON ON COLLECTING ART

Last week Michael Crichton's collection of contemporary art sold at Christie's for a whopping for $93.3m. Every work sold, including a record-breaking Jasper Johns flag for $28.6m. Though partly the product of trigger-happy Hollywood types and the return of consumer confidence, the success of this sale lies in Michael Crichton himself, who collected not what was trendy but what he loved. For Crichton, a popular novelist and screenwriter who died from cancer in 2008, writing was his day job; he would lock himself away with a typewriter and take records of how many pages he wrote, how many days it took. But art was his passion. He treasured his paintings, placing them around the house to fit his mood and projects so often that he had to change the walls to cover the pockmarks.

The late writer of "Jurassic Park", Crichton also often wrote and spoke about art, offering an insightful outsider's take on the Los Angeles art scene and his experiences as a collector. He even wrote the exhibition catalogue for his good friend Jasper Johns's 1977 retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Courtesy of the Christie's catalogue of his collection, we've culled five ways Crichton found meaning in art:

On pop art:
"I was beginning to work in the visual medium of film, and I was struck by the fact that American painters employed much more modern, if mundane imagery than American filmmakers in the 1960s. I wanted this print imagery around me, and I was interested to see what, if anything would change in my work as a result."

On the difference between writing and making art:
"There's something very agreeable to watch people who are making something with their hands that you can hold up and look at and walk around and touch... Giant machines were involved and lots of conversations. It was a very good change of pace from what I was ordinarily doing, which was to sit alone in my room with a typewriter, beating my head against it."

On commissioning art:
"You become a patron, you're a little Medici for 5 minutes, the artist is working for you. That's the way studio executives are towards people who make movies. They have the money and you have the movie and everyone wants what the other person has. Claes [Oldenburg] was going to make this sculpture and I wanted it...I had certain ideas but if I stuck my oar in, then it's not an Oldenburg piece...so I really just had to sit there twiddling my thumbs..."

And two things about Jasper Johns:
"John's work provokes a visual search and that when confronted by his art, the characteristic posture of the viewer is one of searching. The search can take many forms. An effort to decipher a puzzle, to uncover a secret, to resolve the contradiction, to answer the question posed or implied by the canvas."

"Johns always makes you aware of the paintings as an object. What Johns is doing is, in essence, indicating to you that the canvas is not a window on the world and not an insight into the artist's imagination. He is genuinely doing something to emphasize the object-ness of the thing that hangs on the wall."

~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

Picture Credit: Jasper Johns, Flag, encaustic and printed paper collage on paper laid down on canvas, courtesy of Christie's