Collector as a Consumer of Art and its Guardian: From Commodification to Patronage

The suggested subject is topical in the context on studying the real life of an artwork as a specific product after its leaving the artist’s studio into the broader field of social functioning, e. g. in the private collections. Current Ukrainian practice is still insufficiently studied and differentiated by its trends. Following this research interest, there is a need to systematize the fragmented and dispersed information about the functioning of an artwork in collector’s possession. Thus far, the specific social group of collectors was on the sidelines of research. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, collectors were persecuted as a “bourgeois element” of society. Collectors existed in the underground and never paraded their activities. Hence, neither the phenomenon of collecting nor the versatile interests of the collectors or the forms of their activity, were not available for academic research. Art collecting as a separate sociocultural phenomenon emerged in independent Ukraine during the 1990s and 2020s. Finally, the exhibitions of the artwork solely from the private collection were organized. The relations between the artists and the collectors of their works are still awaiting for a proper critical review and analytical study. Within this general topic, the paper focuses on the history and aesthetic value of Yuriy Nebesnyk’s (Uzhgorod, Ukraine) personal collection that was formed since the 1970s and to the early 2020s as a possible model for establishing the private museum of contemporary Ukrainian art.