<em>The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property </em> with Eunsong Kim, Jessica Lynne, Kameelah Janan Rasheed & Hrag Vartanian

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 Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press 2024) 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.

Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Artforum, The Believer, Frieze, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and Oxford American, where she is a contributing editor. She is the recipient of a 2020 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation, and she is the inaugural recipient of the Beverley Art Writers Travel Grant awarded in 2022 by the American Australian Association. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. 

Jessica is currently an associate editor at Momus and host of the limited series podcast, Harlem is Everywhere.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/her) was born in East Palo Alto, CA. Rasheed is a learner, artist, and publisher who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Rasheed explores writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. With an interest in the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheed is interested in Black knowledge production and fugitivity. Rasheed is the author of five artists’ books: in the coherence, we weep (2023); i am not done yet ( 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (2019); No New Theories (2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (2021). Rasheed’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship, the 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research, and a 2022 Creative Capital Award. Currently, she is a full-time lecturer at the School of Art at Yale University in the MFA Sculpture department.

The editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic, Hrag Vartanian is an art critic, writer, curator, artist, and lecturer on contemporary art with an expertise on the intersection of art and politics.

He is the recipient of the Susan C. Larsen Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Arts Writing by the Rabkin Foundation in 2024.

In The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property, 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.