In The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press, 2024), 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 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.

Eunsong Kim is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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