Overview

In The Politics of Collecting, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of United States 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 she 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.

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Eunsong Kim is associate professor of English at Northeastern University. Catherine Ho is a Midwesterner living in NYC. She's an AudioFile Best of 2021, Earphones Award winner, and AA2022-nominated voice actor. She's voiced hundreds of characters for the Big 5 publishers, Nickelodeon, Havas, TedLive, Macy's, IBM, and more. Raised in Ohio by English language learners, she has an ear and agility for accents. She is a relentless and eclectic consumer of media in all forms, reader for a literary magazine, coached and passable at kickboxing and boxing, music literate, a trained singer, and truly mediocre at the ukulele.

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