The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property

Join us for a conversation with Eunsong Kim who will be joined by Jessica Lynne and Hrag Vartania in celebration of Kim’s new book The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property published by Duke University Press.

This event is free and open to all. Register to attend. This event takes place in Skylight Room (9100) at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC.

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 and 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.

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, 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.

This event is organized by Juwon Jun and presented by the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. Visit our website here for more information about this event and the speakers.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Skylight Room (9100), The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, United States