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—is 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.

Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University.

Prelude. On Motivations  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction  1
1. Personal Collection and the Museum Form: Racial Capitalism, Settler Colonialism, and the Legacies of the Homestead Strike of 1892  33
2. Scientific Management and Conceptual Art: The Invention of the Artist Manager  62
3. Whiteness as Property and Found Object Art: Collecting and Canonizing Marcel Duchamp  92
4. Whiteness and the New: Neoliberalism and the Building of the Archive for New Poetry  118
5. Colonially Bound, Digitally Free: On the Distance between Object and Image  146
6. Neoliberal Aesthetics: The Legacies of the White Modernism  178
Coda. On Inoperation and Glory  208
Notes  215
Bibliography  273
Index