• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1314 0

by Russell W. Belk, the author of Collecting in a Consumer Society, and the Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at York University in Toronto, has found that about one in three people in North America collect. Most don’t purposefully start out intending to collect something, but realize once they have a few of something that there is a bounded category in which they have begun to have objects. “This can lead to feelings of mastery, competence, and success, all of which can be gratifying. Collecting enlarges our sense of self and this can make us feel unique,” Belk said in an e-mail. “The collection can also provide the numinous benefit of contact with something perceived as transcendent, almost sacred.”

Finding important or beautiful pieces of erotic art had a liberating effect on Naomi and she began to experience a metamorphosis that is anything but novel among collectors. She began to feel a higher purpose than just the accumulation of a rampantly heterodox collection. She divined a calling in liberating erotic art from those who were afraid to display it. And as she collected it, the art educated Naomi. “I’m a realist in life, and I’m a realist in what I like in art,” she said. “But I learned about surrealism, expressionism, and folk art. I made myself into an art historian.” She has since self-published and had published a total of five books, reproducing parts of her collection with scant explications.

Naomi traveled extensively to shows, exhibits, and museums. She met with dealers and sellers wherever she could, often accompanied by J. C. Harris, a striking-looking, six-foot-two African-American private detective she met in Tampa. Now in his early fifties and the general manager of the museum, Harris’s imposing stature, no doubt, dissuaded anyone from greeting Naomi’s curiosity with any disrespect. In turn, she shared the process of buying, judging, and authenticating the art with him. Collecting, he said, “rejuvenated her. It gave her an agenda, it perked her up. The woman is phenomenally intelligent and tenacious. It makes me happy to see her fulfill her dreams.”

Finding erotic art in Europe was, at first, as difficult as it has been at home. Naomi’s first buying trip to Paris was a complete flop. Belatedly, she realized that many of the antiques dealers in the flea markets came from rural France, and that she had failed to unearth a single piece of erotic art because most of those dealers spoke little English and she spoke no French. When she returned a decade later, she had a stroke of genius. She wore a cardboard sign around her neck, proclaiming: Je cherche de l’art erotique. Soon, antique dealers were virtually running out of their booths and pulling her into their shops to show their hidden erotica. The method worked so well, she had signs made up in languages for every foreign country she visited. Even in flea markets at home she began wearing a black plastic placard emblazoned with “Buying Erotica.”

One afternoon during her second trip to Paris, Naomi decided to visit the Musée de l’érotisme on the Boulevard de Clichy. The museum, which opened in 1998, included about 1,500 exhibits displayed on seven floors of a nineteenth-century town house. To show off, Naomi says she brought along one of her books about her collection. A year later, the museum’s owners contacted her through their investment adviser in Miami. They wanted to know if she was interested in joining her collection with theirs to open an erotic art museum in London. When she turned them down, fearful that prudish British customs officials would seize pieces of her collection, the Frenchmen offered to lease Naomi’s collection to open a museum anywhere in the United States she chose.

She considered Las Vegas, New Orleans, San Francisco, St. Petersburg, and Miami. But finding the right location for a sex museum was more challenging than she expected. Each time Naomi found a suitable city and location, opposition arose. The search took nearly five years.

Then there were issues with her prospective French partners. Initially, the Parisians