A Thorn in the Occupier’s Eye

South Lebanon is a lesson in steadfastness — an obstinate and determined testament to the willingness of an indigenous people to confront their occupier and… Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property. Duke University Press Books, 2024. 328 pages. Eunsong Kim is a poet, writer, and Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University. Her new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property, traces the history of US museums to conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp to dispel myths around artistic merit, avant garde art, and white male genius. Kim’s research dives deep into primary documents – Jim Crow-era financial statements, correspondence between art curators and financiers, and labor movement records – to ultimately look past much of the romance and mysticism that veils modern and contemporary art to ask questions about the human price of institution-building. The book is essential reading for arts workers who feel conflicted about their desire to support creativity while feeling despair in current systems available to do so. It is an elegy for lives destroyed under false pretenses of charity and aesthetic advancement. It is vindication against recent violences committed by the institution that are mismarketed as caretaking. As Kim dares to put it, “whose garbage becomes the archive?” ▼ How did you look at the history of art and understand all the violence that has made it possible without becoming disillusioned with art making or discrediting aesthetics altogether? I mean, I am fairly disillusioned. I’m excited that the book is able to offer, perhaps, more than my own personal disillusionment. Something that is very clear to me and in researching and writing the book were just very basic questions of like, how much did it cost and how did the institution acquire it? Something that was very much on my mind was going back and thinking about my own education process, like how I learned about certain works of art, how I learned about certain collections of poetry, and how education and institutions were so pivotal to my learning, the learning that I do against the institution or in spite of the institution. When I was at the Getty as a graduate student, I noticed how the Getty would offer these “free” bussing programs, where they would bus in students from all over Los Angeles so they can go through The Getty and learn about art, and then the docents who would be at the site would be volunteers that would take the students through the museum. I think on paper, this sounds like a fantastic program. Why shouldn’t students all over Los Angeles experience looking through the Getty? But if you peel it back, the Getty as an institution collects pre-19th century Western European art. This is the mandate of the founder of the museum. These are the collections that he wanted, and that’s why the photo section is separate from the museum. This is the version of aesthetics that he left for the world, and that continues to be perpetuated because this was his understanding of what is considered important and beautiful. It reifies this argument that I think is naturalized for so many people, that art is an exceptional thing that you do at the benevolence of somebody else. Somebody granted this to you, and you have to go and be really respectful and in reverence of this institution. But these institutions are fundamental sites of expropriation. From when you’re young to when you’re old, they’re always these exceptional spaces. Our definition of art making is constantly removed from this thing called life. At the end of the book, I’m really trying to think about, what else can art and aesthetics and all of these words that are incredibly fetishized be? Is it just this professionalized site that’s the place of the institution, or is it something that is part of our lives? I’m interested in the inspirations you take from your religious upbringing – as you say in the opening chapter that accepting the good will of wealthy Christians meant “enforced gratitude.” I wrote that at the very end. It just was like me sitting with, “What is my relationship to like the collection?” What’s my relationship to the Arensberg Collection and the Philadelphia Art Museum? On one level, it’s hilarious to me that I’m looking through all of their sales books. Something that I don’t think it was imagined that this is why the sales books were acquired – for a researcher like me to look through and think about labor history, or the history of racial capitalism and the development of their collections. But this motivation is personal in some ways, because I think I see this logic of benevolence in so many arenas, and I want to just help undo some of the the guilt and anxiety that I think that accrues in a lot of spaces that if one is paid or one receives an award, then one does not a critique institution. I agree with you that I always feel like artists can be more critical; that they should take initiative to say “no” to things that are unethical. But sometimes I wonder how much individual agency we really have. I mean, you know, I read Lucy Lippard. I’m here to bite the hand. And yet, I see people like David Velasco getting fired from ArtForum just for publishing a letter in support of Palestine or Samia Halaby losing an exhibition over similar remarks. There are serious repercussions for saying anything. In the first chapter, when I’m going through the paintings that Henry Clay Frick purchased, I do not think that the political impetus is on the artist, the way that I think a lot of debates end up concentrating on like, is the artist in the show? Is the artist not in the show? Did the artist say yes? Did the artist say no? I actually think it feels like the worst kind of individual liberal thinking, because I do think that, in fixating on the individual artist, what gets missed is the entire history of the structure of the institution. We bypass what the roots really are like, what the power structures in place are doing, because we’re fixated on the “good” artists or the “bad” artists. And I think even if we have our fan favorites, which I do, that conversation makes it so that even if you get one board member off, how do they get appointed? What’s that process? When I was in the Frick Collection, the one thing that was so clear to me was that someone needs to write a book on the history of board formations. How was this decided that all of these institutions just have boards? And I can say that for some of the earlier museum boards, it’s not like there was an artist, but if there is, there’s one or two. Board members are mostly other billionaires. They’re mostly other corporate executives, so they’re all run like corporations. With the board members of the Frick, like Rockefeller and Mellon, how did all of these people who profess that they don’t know anything about art become the board of this museum? They’re prioritizing financial immortality. I think a bigger question is, what if some people have more agency than others? What’s the conversation going to look like when everyone has equal access to this thing called agency? Why do some people have more agency in an institution to do certain things, to fire people for signing letters? I think rather than fixate on what does it mean for someone to say yes or no, the question should be flipped and say, why is it that some people can fire other people? Well, I fixate on people. What I appreciate most about the book is that it helps me think through more recent conflicts I fixate on, like Dana Schutz’s abstraction of Emmett Till. It was a section, but I took it out. I realized that there’s actually been so much good writing on it that I don’t need to say something. But obviously, that’s another really good example. People really tried to die on that hill, you know, in defense of her. And it was shocking. Do you think your analysis of Santiago Sierra’s neoliberal aesthetics can apply to that instance, not only to the physical depiction, but the fact that curators couldn’t entertain the destruction of an artwork? I am always really curious about this conversation on destruction of our objects. In an earlier essay, I write about how the former CEO of the Getty says something like, “we take refugees, why can’t we take their objects?” Mostafa Heddaya wrote a while ago about how so many museums freaked out when they thought objects were being destroyed in Iraq by various different militant groups. And then it turned out like those were all fakes, but the museum curators and CEOs, without making a statement about the war, would immediately make a statement about the objects, without even verifying whether or not the objects in the museum in Iraq have been destroyed. I think you see a lot of these moments where there seems to be an impulse to buy a Western Imperial understanding of the world that you save the objects, but when we’re thinking of care for people, communities and the environment, that seems separate. Which is truly wild, right? There is something that is happening collectively that protection of the object seems to supersede protection of the people. This is to say, I don’t think that all objects should be destroyed. I think that’s a fun position. But when does someone get to say these objects are no longer part of us? I found the fundamental celebration of destruction of objects as manifestos that were written by Surrealists and the futurists that are celebrated in art history as part of this art. If it’s done as performance, and there’s documentation of it, that seems okay, because it’s continuing a line. But when the object becomes something that people get to decide on because it’s part of their lives, that’s where the conflict seems to be. I want to stay on this issue and consider if prioritizing a “debate” or “conversation” over actual actionable change might also be part of neoliberal aesthetics. In your discussion of Louis Agassiz’s daguerrotypes of enslaved people at Harvard, there also seems to be a lot of time and resources wasted on debating whether or not objects that perpetuate anti-black violence should remain under white ownership and circulate casually for public access – something that should not even be up for debate. Yes. One of the main questions is, if Harvard can take care of it in a way that the descendant cannot. If it is in her care, what if they fade? What if they’re damaged, and then what if they dissolve? They did fade under Harvard’s care. Very few people talk about the fact that they also didn’t fully take care of it. And then they digitized it, and so now, it’s theirs forever. But they were objects that were created to support a white supremacist understanding of the world. If the descendants decide that they are going to do something else with it, how many people get to partake in that conversation? It’s not even conceivable that images that were made essentially to uphold enslavement, we can’t imagine destroying that. Fundamental preservation is not the objective. [The descendants of who were depicted in the daguerrotypes] don’t get to decide, in any way, shape or form, how it exists in their lives. It’s decided for them and on their behalf. I want to talk about Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and what he called “readymades” – all of which you have chosen not to reproduce photographs of in this book.  I just figured that, like I didn’t reproduce any of Santiago Sierra’s work, he himself has talked about how

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