A collection of art is among the most personal things a person can assemble. It reflects taste, judgement, patience and means. It is also, over time, one of the more thoroughly documented things a person can own, and the documentation tends to lead back to them.

Art carries its history with it. A work's provenance, the record of who has owned it, is part of what gives it value, and so it is kept and, in many cases, published. When a work changes hands at auction, the result is frequently a matter of public record, the price included. When a work is lent to an exhibition, the lender is often named, or readily inferred. Each of these is a small disclosure, and a serious collection generates a great many of them.

Assembled, they describe more than the collection. They describe the collector. A pattern of acquisitions suggests taste, means, and the direction of an interest. A record of loans places a person in a particular world and among particular institutions. A provenance trail can establish, quietly, that a person owns something of considerable value, and roughly what it is worth.

There is also the practical apparatus around a collection: the parties who advise on it, insure it, store it, move it and value it. Each holds information, and each is a point at which something about the collection, and its owner, exists outside the owner's own control.

None of this is a reason to collect less, or to collect so privately that the pleasure is lost. It is a reason to understand that a collection is not only an asset and a pleasure but a record, and that the record says something about the person who built it.

As with any other exposure, the sensible course is to know what that record currently shows, so that what is visible about a collection is visible by choice.