
Holzer questions authority and the construction of power. Are these statements true just because she says they are? Are these statements true just because of their logical form? Are these statements true just because they are etched in a marble bench?

I visited Time Capsule, Age 13 to 21: The Contemporary Art Collection of Jason Rubell, with slight reservations. After all, how much could one expect from an exhibition of pieces that was not only originally curated by, but also collected by college student? The closest I have ever gotten to purchasing artwork was buying printed $14.95 posters for my dorm room, so it was difficult to imagine a teenage-Rubell going to the back room of galleries to purchase authentic pieces of contemporary art.

When I spoke with collector and curator of Time Capsule Jason Rubell, before he gave his recent tour of the Nasher Museum of Art, I explained that ‘s piece Blah was my favorite in the show. The fact that he echoed this sentiment astonished me, so I held my tongue when I changed my mind after he told the background story of Thomas Ruff’s Porträts.
When you first think about art collectors, do bar mitzvah age boys come to mind? No, not for most people. But, to Duke alum (T ’91), Jason Rubell, there seemed no better way to spend birthday or holiday money as a young teen than to purchase art. Living in a decade of phenomenal contemporary art growth, Rubell spent eight years assembling what would serendipitously become his senior project in 1990 — A Duke Student Collects: Contemporary Art from Jason Rubell. Twenty-one years later, the impressive conglomerate of over eighty works of art returns to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University as Time Capsule, Age 13 to 21: The Contemporary Art Collection of Jason Rubell.

Jonathan Prinz in artbouillon: “Hardly a museum exists anywhere in the world that isn’t built around, or strengthened by, works amassed by collectors. In that sense, they haven’t only been collecting for themselves, but also for us. The Nasher Museum at Duke University is named for such collectors and its newly opened exhibit, Time Capsule, celebrates the collecting of another, if not collecting itself.”

“As the son of contemporary art collectors, Jason Rubell spent a fair amount of his childhood at gallery openings and museum exhibitions,” she writes. “By the time he was a teenager, Rubell started buying artwork that caught his eye, using money he’d made stringing tennis rackets. But he never thought of himself as a collector until his senior year at Duke.”

You might think that the title of the exhibition — “Time Capsule Age 13 to 21: The Contemporary Art Collection of Jason Rubell” — can’t be right, that a collection of contemporary art featuring artists like Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Sol LeWitt and Francesco Clemente couldn’t have been compiled by a kid between the ages of 13 and 21, but that’s exactly what this exhibition is.

For all the daring and vigor of How Soon Now, the Rubell Family Collection’s most surprising move might be Time Capsule, the 20th anniversary installation of Jason Rubell’s senior curatorial project first exhibited at the Duke University Museum of Art in 1991. The exhibition, which Jason curated with the advising of Kristine Stiles includes 53 artists fitted into a tight space, and offers a portrait of the collector as a young man and offers insight into how the Rubell Family Collection ever came to be.