No Collection Is an Island: On the Dynamics of Art Collections and Their Ends

• In Event: How Collections End: Objects, Meaning and Loss in Laboratories and Museums - II

Abstract

Although assembling stuff is a ubiquitous human and nonhuman activity, a collection is defined through the specific processes of categorisation through which it - and its collected items - acquire value. When Joseph Alsop in 1982 linked Art Collecting, Art History and the Art Market as co-dependent traits and activities particular to what he refers to as the Western Art System and only seen in a few other historical contexts, he offered a conceptual scaffold to work from where Art is understood as a highly particular and peculiar category. This framework helps us think about the dynamics of collecting works of art today, in a certain light. Although there is a genuine interest in art within STS research there is a puzzling lack of detailed research on Art as a category. Drawing on material from an ethnographic study on artistic practices, which includes interviews with private collectors, museum staff and curators, this paper insists on the importance of seeing collections as dynamic and, in a sense, organic. It argues that a logic of perishability and risk for destruction (disruption/ending), is not only a crucial part of this dynamic, but that in the case of Art Collections, this delicacy actually adds value while paradoxically working in synergy with fixed ideas about eternity and agelessness.

Author

• Annika Capelán, Independent/Aarhus University