Vessels with marked imperfections appear repeatedly in acquisition records, alongside others gathered without particular notice—challenging a simple notion of value based on aesthetic merit alone. These choices hint at an interplay between focused observation and underlying desire, a subtle resistance to purely rational assessment shaping the very systems through which objects are exchanged. Such collecting practices demonstrate an ethics_cost: the pursuit of completeness necessarily diminishes attention paid to absences, with time_drift slowly altering what histories become visible.
