In fact, it has become an obsessive, 'round the clock hobby for a large segment of these individuals.
"The Clock," with its obsessive compiling, its miniature riffs, its capacious comic and dramatic turns, speaks to the completist lurking in all of present-day us.
None of what I saw in "The Clock" felt tragic, despite the work's obsessive preoccupation with the materiality of time, and its endless ticking away toward an end.
It may be because his or her biological clock is ticking and he or she is being exceptionally desperate or obsessive.
Obsessive collector also has horde of post-War European art, ancient European artifacts, clocks and furniture.
Combine your longing for the good old days of early video gaming with your obsessive need to be on time, and you've got yourself a series of clocks made from old Atari cartridges selling for $20 apiece.
Like the mission church in Hitchcock's Vertigo (certainly influenced by De Chirico) this repeated, obsessive scene tempts us in; we imagine ourselves walking across that empty space, under that frozen clock.
Mr. Edey, who died in 1999, was an obsessive and discerning horologist, and the 21 pieces in the show are about as great as clocks and watches get, none more so than a 17th-century barometer clock with a marquetry-veneered case attributed to André-Charles Boulle.
Such obsessive themes demand an obsessive form.
