The Politics of Collecting with Eunsong Kim

In her new book, 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. 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.

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. She is also the author of Gospel of Regicide (2017) and, with Sung Gi Kim, a translation of Kim Eon Hee’s poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? (2019). In 2021 she co-founded the journal offshoot, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.