Eunsong Kim w/ Chandan Reddy, THE POLITICS OF COLLECTING

About the Book

In , 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.

About the Author

Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. Her practice spans: literary studies, critical digital studies, poetics, translation, visual culture and critical race & ethnic studies. Her writings have appeared in: Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and in the book anthologies, Deep Fakes from the Algorithm’s & Society series, Poetics of Social Engagement and Reading Modernism with Machines. Her poetry has appeared in the Brooklyn Magazine, The Iowa Review, Minnesota Review amongst others. She is the author of gospel of regicide, published by Noemi Press in 2017, and with Sung Gi Kim she translated Kim Eon Hee’s poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? published in 2019. Her academic monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Asetheticization of Property materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of US museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions. She is the recipient of the Ford Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Andy Warhol Art Writers Program, and Yale’s Poynter Fellowship.

Chandan Reddy is Associate Professor in the departments of the Comparative History of Ideas and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. His book, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State (2011) from Duke University Press won the Alan Bray Memorial award for Queer studies from the MLA as well as the Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Asian American Studies Association, both in 2013. He is co-editor (with Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Jodi Melamed) of the special issue, “”Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism,” Social Text (Spring 2018). His recent publications include, “Convergence, Dissymmetry, Duplicities: Enactments of Queer of Color Critique,” Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, Siobhan Sommerville, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company