Collecting the New

Museums and Contemporary Art

Bruce Altshuler

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780691133737, 9780691119403
• eBook ISBN: 9781400849352
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Collecting the New is the first book on the questions and challenges that museums face in acquiring and preserving contemporary art. Because such art has not yet withstood the test of time, it defies the traditional understanding of the art museum as an institution that collects and displays works of long-established aesthetic and historical value. By acquiring such art, museums gamble on the future. In addition, new technologies and alternative conceptions of the artwork have created special problems of conservation, while social, political, and aesthetic changes have generated new categories of works to be collected.


Following Bruce Altshuler's introduction on the European and American history of museum collecting of art by living artists, the book comprises newly commissioned essays by twelve distinguished curators representing a wide range of museums. First considered are general issues including the acquisition process, and collecting by universal survey museums and museums that focus on modern and contemporary art. Following are groups of essays that address collecting in particular media, including prints and drawings, new (digital) media, and film and video; and national- and ethnic-specific collecting (contemporary art from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and African-American art). The closing essay examines the conservation problems created by contemporary works--for example, what is to be done when deterioration is the artist's intent?


The contributors are Christophe Cherix, Vishakha N. Desai, Steve Dietz, Howard N. Fox, Chrissie Iles and Henriette Huldisch, Pamela McClusky, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Lowery Stokes Sims, Robert Storr, Jeffrey Weiss, and Glenn Wharton.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Collecting the New: A Historical Introduction
• The Right to Be Wrong
• To Have and to Hold
• 9 Minutes 45 Seconds
• Breaking Down Categories: Print Rooms, Drawing Departments, and the Museum
• Keeping Time: On Collecting Film and Video Art in the Museum
• Collecting New-Media Art: Just Like Anything Else, Only Different
• Beyond the “Authentic-Exotic”: Collecting Contemporary Asian Art in the Twenty-first Century
• The Unconscious Museum: Collecting Contemporary African Art without Knowing It
• The Accidental Tourist: American Collections of Latin American Art
• Collecting the Art of African-Americans at the Studio Museum in Harlem: Positioning the “New” from the Perspective of the Past
• The Challenges of Conserving Contemporary Art
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Photography Credits