The Politics Of Collecting

Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms.

In The Politics of Collecting, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp’s canonization has more to do with his patron’s donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp’s work, and uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry’s collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic success and talent and calls for a new vision of art beyond the cultural institution.

This book is the outcome of a series of lectures and workshops held at St. Cross College and All Souls College, Oxford in late 2004 on the ethics and politics of collecting and owning cultural artefacts.

"The first book of Eunsong Kim begins with a long form poem that delves into contemplative lenses of religiosity, historical and philosophical in contemporary cultural contexts" --

The coauthors of this theoretically innovative work explore the relationships among anthropological fieldwork, museum collecting and display, and social governance in the early twentieth century in Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, and the United States. With case studies ranging from the Musée de l'Homme's 1930s fieldwork missions in French Indo-China to the influence of Franz Boas's culture concept on the development of American museums, the authors illuminate recent debates about postwar forms of multicultural governance, cultural conceptions of difference, and postcolonial policy and practice in museums. Collecting, Ordering, Governing is essential reading for scholars and students of anthropology, museum studies, cultural studies, and indigenous studies as well as museum and heritage professionals.

Collecting Cultures investigates colonial museum collecting practices in indigenous communities based upon the case of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land.

The political elite of Nazi Germany perceived itself as a cultural elite as well. In Art as Politics in the Third Reich, Jonathan Petropoulos explores the elite's cultural aspirations by examining both the formulation of a national aesthetic policy

"Explores the paradigm of "area studies" - a way of supporting regionally-focused collecting, processing, and liaison work - in the academic library, through an explicitly anti-colonial lens"--