RIP Rutherford Chang, who collected more than 3,400 copies of the Beatles White Album 💫

 

RIP Rutherford Chang, who collected more than 3,400 copies of the Beatles White Album. 

In a fascinating obituary, the New York Times reports:

Chang, a conceptual artist, turned his collection of the Beatles’ “White Album” into a meditation on the aging of a vinyl classic. 

Mr. Chang was not initially a collector of the 1968 double LP “The Beatles,” better known as “The White Album.” He bought one copy of it as a teenager, but when he got a second one some years later, he realized that the two — with their plain white covers as blank canvases— had changed over time.

“The more I got, the more I could see how different these once identical objects had become,” he told the website The Creative Independent in 2017. “I didn’t know where it was going when I started other than that I wanted at least enough to see the differences between them. Then it just kept going and I can’t stop.”

Mr. Chang’s installation, “We Buy White Albums,” unveiled at the Recess gallery in Manhattan in 2013, took the form of a facsimile of a record shop, with albums in bins and turntables to play the music.

One wall was filled with albums whose owners had put their names on the covers, as well as written letters, poems and other ephemera on them. Some had drawn pictures. The covers also showed wear patterns created by rotting cardboard.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/arts/rutherford-chang-dead.html

The exhibition traveled to several cities, including Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, in 2014.