Volume 25, Number 20 · December 21, 1978
How Did Art Collecting Begin?
By Joseph W. Alsop
About people wearing clothes for warmth, only a certain kind of American sociologist would ask: 'Why on earth do they do that?' But it is not silly to ask the same question about the practice of stretching the lobes of pierced ears to make pendulous loops, and then using the loops to carry enormous ear plugs like the gold ones that were a caste mark of the Incas. And the human cultures that have had 'Orejones'—'eared ones' as Pizarro's band called the Incas—have been rather more numerous in history than the cultures having art collectors.
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