Museums lie at the center of much media coverage and popular debate in America today, the subject of controversy provoked by Trump’s insistence on rewriting history by influencing the curatorial direction of Washington cultural institutions. In July 2025, Black painter Amy Sherald cancelled her planned Smithsonian exhibition over possible censorship of her painting depicting a transgender Statue of Liberty, which the museum was considering removing from Sherald’s show in deference to the President, igniting a firestorm in the art world.
These and other hot-button disputes over the role of museums in cultural preservation throw into sharp relief the essential nature of Eunsong Kim’s exquisite monograph The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (Duke UP, 2024). Kim historicizes the problematic processes through which US museums developed to reveal how the art world has always been imbricated in racial capitalism and settler colonialism. The Politics of Collecting demonstrates that, despite neoliberal facades of multicultural inclusiveness, the high art world, art and literary criticism, and cultural institutions like museums and archives remain enmeshed in the afterlives of slavery, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism. Kim argues, in other words, that contemporary art institutions and aesthetic practices are hardly as progressive as many believe—an insight that has rich and wide resonances for our current moment.
Kim’s argument is simple yet executed and (well) supported through a dizzyingly complex web of methodologies that trace the roots and routes of capitalist snares from Renaissance-era art patronage to America’s most well-respected art museums. She draws heavily from Black feminist thinking (especially from Cheryl Harris on the foundational relationship between whiteness and property and from Saidiya Hartman on the afterlife of slavery) and selectively on Marxist analysis (particularly Cedric Robinson’s Black Radical reworking of Marxist tenets). Through historical materialist and feminist analysis, Kim demystifies aspects of high art praxis and museum collecting principles that are typically framed as immune to financial and political sway. By contrast, she reveals how these aesthetic and curatorial approaches instead explicitly uphold anti-Blackness and colonialist values.
While fine art’s system of valuation elevates conceptual art as the pinnacle of liberation and purports to make aesthetic judgments based on neutral merit-based criteria, it is fundamentally indebted to a racialized system of value. Grounded in Harris’s influential argument about the co-construction of legal conceptualizations of property and whiteness in the United States, Kim asks “how is it that what ‘counts’ as art expands, while who counts as artist remains [primarily white]” (7). She unpacks this “conundrum” by paying overdue attention to the high art’s own property relations, which foreground the economic value of whiteness. Through a series of case studies, the book highlights the ongoing importance of critiquing influential cultural institutions and pervasive aesthetic procedures rather than just individual artists and administrators.
The book’s first chapter materializes the provenance of New York City’s Frick Collection by linking robber baron Henry Clay Frick’s acquisition of art to his suppression of the 1892 Homestead Strike, a case study that connects the anti-Black discourse of “scab” labor with other exploitative labor practices. Building on this foundation, the second chapter suggests that histories of scientific management and conceptual art run parallel. By analyzing the colonial underpinnings of scientific management, Kim argues that structural conditions of Taylorism (with its concomitant separation between hand work and mind work) enabled the art world to transform “innovation” into its contemporary form, wherein it serves as a descriptor laden with value connotations that privileges the artist who is disconnected from the material labor of producing pieces.1 Having established these ideas, Kim turns in Chapter 3 to Marcel Duchamp’s leading role in the origin story of conceptual art, averring that the tradition of found art that he represents is rooted in racialized understandings of property unavailable to nonwhite artists.
Coming after the first half of the book’s focus on visual art, the fourth chapter’s turn to contemporary archives may feel like an outlier but offers a welcome transdisciplinary intervention at a time when poetry scholarship has been reckoning with questions that parallel those Kim is bringing to the art world. Much recent poetry criticism interrogates the often racist past of the field’s fundamental terms and expands materialist methodologies to better grapple with ongoing biases in interpretative approaches, canonization, and critical framings that have long elevated the literary genre as transcendently immaterial.2 Kim explores the collecting priorities of UC San Diego’s Archive for New Poetry to unpack how the frequently used term “experimental” (in poetic discourse, as across the art world) is expounded as explicitly the purview of whiteness. Probing the poetry world usefully expands Kim’s own archive, opening avenues for further investigation about interconnections between high art and contemporary poetry.
The book’s fifth chapter is perhaps its most intriguing as Kim deftly examines the provenance of daguerreotypes of enslaved persons held by Harvard University and the Getty Museum through a critical framework provided by artist Carrie Mae Weem, whose artwork incorporating these archival images stages its own institutional critique. Kim’s discussion centers on legal notions of property ownership that refuse to repair or even acknowledge the material and psychological harm still enacted by circulating such antebellum representations of enslaved individuals. Further, this segment of the book introduces key ideas about how digitizing fails to eliminate these concerns as institutions tenaciously cling to ownership and privatization.
Finally, Chapter 6 radically reframes existing scholarship about prominent Spanish conceptual artist Santiago Sierra. Kim takes Sierra’s work as a test case for interrogating the managerial logics underlying contemporary galleries. She exposes the exploitation of dispossessed subjects across his body of work and explains these exploitative tendencies as the pinnacle of neoliberal aesthetics, defined persuasively by book’s end as the aestheticized practice of Taylorism. Taylorism’s mode of scientific management advocates differentiating “mental” and “hand” workers and therefore justifies exploitation as efficiency; Sierra’s conceptual praxis depends on the labor and humiliation of individuals from marginalized, dispossessed communities. Therefore, Kim reveals how celebrating his art as somehow anticapitalist (as so many have done) erases from view the central fact that defending whiteness as property remains foundational to conceptual art praxis and to the gatekeeping of the high art world generally.
Together, these chapters illustrate ways that art practitioners and scholars take recourse in protective “shields” that indemnify them against interrogation, such as “the shield that terminology such as new and experimental provides against material analysis, the shield of archival preservation, the shield of an immaterial removed of material” (15), or the particular shield offered by tracing conceptual practice to Duchamp. Under cover of such deflective shields, neoliberal aesthetics are perpetuated and glorified. Instead of conferring laurels for very intermittent (but highly-publicized) instance of institutional repatriation or other liberal practices, Kim emphasizes that these exceptions prove the rule—the colonial roots of museums and archives and the conceptual roots of the property form betray the ongoing, pervasive rule of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and racial capitalism in the contemporary art world.3
The Politics of Collecting promises no easy curative or reparative reading. Instead, it argues that the only just way forward might be wholesale abolition of the art museum and the art world as we know it. This stance situates her book in rich conversation with other investigations of how concepts of “abolition” relate to academic discourse. Like Jess A. Goldberg in Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice, Kim also turns a self-aware eye to her own analytical praxes throughout, recognizing the compromised, partial nature of academic interventions.4 The Politics of Collecting does, however, offer readings of a handful of art practitioners who are managing (precisely through work premised on and ideologically engaged with untidy irresolution) to interrogate or upset, if fleetingly, this seemingly all-encompassing web of imbrications. By explicitly challenging property claims and applying critical lenses derived from postcolonial and critical race theory, these projects by non-white artists Noah Purifoy, Wanda Coleman, Carrie Mae Weems, Sasha Huber, Divya Mehra, and Wafaa Bilal illustrate alternative praxes that defy rather than reify the art world’s systemic failures.
Yet Kim reminds readers that these alternative praxes do not operate outside of existing structures, concluding The Politics of Collecting with a resounding charge to shift our gaze entirely from the museum’s artists to its laborers, from privileged artists “[t]o those inoperative, who make nothing but the world” (214), to quote her final words. If it is unclear how such an approach would look in practice, how we would move outside frames imposed by dominant systems and disengage from the always-already tainted sites of research to which we are accustomed, that failure of imagination is a testament to Kim’s essential point.
As I wrote this review, international headlines were proliferating over an unprecedented heist at the Louvre; consistently, reporting and statements from French officials feature recurring language deeming the stolen works “priceless,” “of inestimable” or “incalculable” “value” and condemning the act as a “brazen heist,” an act of “thievery.” Kim’s book provides a wholly different framework for assessing the events. The French media’s discursive maneuvers present the stolen art simultaneously through the language of capitalist valuation and yet also (contradictorily) as though exempt from and above such systems, all while wholly ignoring the irony of dubbing the jewels “looted” even as the museum’s collection contains countless holdings stolen from other cultures—a perfectly illustrative example of the ideological tensions that Kim’s work investigates.
In addition, fixation on the robbery as illicit positions the Louvre as rightful custodian (or property stakeholder) of the missing jewels, sidestepping the fraught histories and materialist capitalist conditions Kim exposes. Again, beneficiaries of whiteness-as-property and of the legacies and ramifications of racial capitalism and settler colonialism dictate terminologies, discouraging news outlets and museum visitors from attending to the Louvre’s ethics.5 If nothing else, injecting these ideas into the conversation is a minor step toward enacting the imaginary Kim calls for—and her excellent book aptly provides tools to do so.
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Endnotes
- In October 2025, press coverage about the then-impending auction of a version of Maurizio Cattelan’s toilet, “America,” struck notes that illustrate Kim’s point. Sotheby’s head of contemporary art stated that “the starting bid in accordance with the price of gold was really a way to lean into the very essence of the conceptual basis behind the artwork, which is largely to draw attention to the difference between a work’s artistic value, and a work’s inherent material value” (qtd. in Jacqui Palumbo, “How much would you pay for an infamous gold toilet?”, CNN, 31 October 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/31/style/maurizio-cattelan-america-gold-toilet-sothebys.) This very presumption that conceptualism enacts some distinction between “artistic” and “material” attempts rhetorically to efface from view the fact that materiality is intrinsic to all artwork: for instance, exploitative labor practices are often required for production of conceptual artworks (cf. Kim on Dafen Village in China 87–89).
- Kim suggests that (with the sole exception of the undeniably essential work of Dorothy Wang) poetry criticism has not begun to reckon with these problems, but I would highlight the long-ongoing interventions on this front by scholars including Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Evie Shockley, Jahan Ramazani, and Rachel Galvin.
- One example that attracted substantial attention as this review was being penned surrounded the decision of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to return work by 19th-century enslaved artist David Drake to his heirs. While certainly a welcome contrast to the mentality displayed by Harvard in ongoing legal action concerning daguerreotypes of enslaved persons (discussed in Kim’s Chapter 5), this single action little changes property relations that undergird institutional practices of collecting.
- For instance, Goldberg levies this self-criticism: “[B]y relying on the traditional tools of formalist close reading, [poetics] sustains the very ordering logics that discipline knowledge into carceral logics in the first place. This is a contaminated book, an implicated method. And yet, what might we glimpse through the holes that are opened?” Jess A. Goldberg, Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024), 120.
- Despite a 2018 government-sponsored report investigating the numerous African-derived art objects plundered and “owned” by French institutions, the resulting process of repatriation has yielded a mere handful of works’ return, just one illustration of Kim’s point.
Laura Elizabeth Vrana