Collectors and Their Collections

I recently spent some time walking through a flea market in Chelsea. My urge was to pick up every old picture, every lost relic of the year before and make it my own. This led me to think about the collector's need to collect and display or organize things according to their own satisfaction. The compulsion to collect crosses over into many aspects of society, the best example I could think of was the museum and the ability for an audience to view what a collector thinks is important. Also, a key part of museums and their collections is what they choose not to display and what they choose to downplay. The concept that most interests me when thinking and engaging in discussions of the museum as alive or dead, is the collection and the collected. The questions posed create a conflict between the institution and the art itself that is being displayed.
The shell of an industrial institution, turned art piece or a reflection of its past has become a part of Chelsea recently, with the opening of the Highline, a railroad track turned park that runs along 9th avenue. The Highline is just one example throughout this city of the ways people collect, display, and re-use. However, it seems that museums in this instance, are not as receptive to their public. The public needs to feel the beauty of the art housed inside the museum, instead of simply viewing it.
My impulse to pick up every rusty screw no longer serving its purpose in a door jam, or every wheel bearing no longer aiding the rotation and weight of an Escalade parked nearby is my collection. My collection is a collection of the industrial that is no longer in business. But is that what a museums collection is? Is a museums collection based on the art that has become of no use to anyone, so it is displayed very carefully as to preserve its dignity? I often think that my desire to collect the unused stems from my origins in Buffalo, New York, a once booming steel town, Buffalo’s steel and grain mills stand empty, but imposingly on our waterfront. My earliest memories of driving by them recall a sense that they were and still are very great, but that they are done being used for their original purpose. I was asking the same of museums. It seems as if they may be a shell of their original form and purpose, rejecting their old visions and ideology, they turn to sensationalism and business.
In my mind, the purpose of a museum is to make the viewers feel something through art. If they cannot feel anything, the institution of the museum is no longer affective.
When I walk into a museum, I feel its history. What does the collection mean to those viewers who are experiencing the museum without knowledge of its history. When I work at the Rubin Museum of Art, it is mesmerizing to me the ease with which people are attracted to these religious and historical relics of the Himalayas. I have always been drawn to them because I knew there was a story behind each symbol, position and framing of the art. The wall text does not do the art justice in the least, and the only way the general viewer is able to access this information is through a tour or if you have outside knowledge. The access of museums to the public, the openness of the collection is sometimes blocked by the exclusiveness. No experience can be had because nothing is provided to the viewer.
Is the collection of the museum and its institutions and politics something that is realized over time? So it is not immediately available? I think that museums should be a conveyance for people to have experiences with art. The exclusion of pieces or people within a collection is to the detriment of the viewer, and ultimately the museum as alive. Because if there is no experience with a living thing, no tangible relationship, the living thing will die.