What Do Museums Collect?

This book What Do Museums Collect? is based on the content of the international symposium organized by the MMCA with the same title from November 30 to December 1, 2018. The symposium was the second initiative of the MMCA Research Project, “What Museums Do” series. What Do Museums Collect? focuses on two factors: the first has to do with the “others” that have been somewhat marginalized through different races and/or cultures; the second includes various issues arising from media and formal changes in contemporary art.

Part 1 explores the relationship between the discourses on the “others” and the museum collection under the theme of “Collecting Others in Contemporary Art Museums: Diversity and Inclusion beyond Post-colonial Discourses.” Almost 30 years after the world’s new international order emerged through the paradigm shift into neoliberalism and globalization with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s, it is changing the topography of the global art world in various ways and requires us to critically accept and understand the discourse of the other. Part 1 covers a variety of issues, ranging from the role of contemporary museums surrounding cultural diversity and the practice of inclusion to the nature and changes of the collection right through to domestic multicultural policies and the representation of the others after the paradigm shift that was a result of globalization.

Part 2 focuses on the remediation of collections in contemporary museums, as well as the media and formal changes in contemporary art under the theme of “Strategies and Remediation of Collecting in Contemporary Art Museums: Rewriting Art-History, Digital Humanities, and the Destination of Artworks.” Contemporary artists go beyond paintings and sculptures to mixed media and installations, performances and new media, and continue to experiment with artworks. In addition, museums that take on these changes present new standards of value through collections and link them with various programs. Moreover, the way they link them is also being digitized in large part, which is changing the way we approach and study museum collections and archive data. Part 2 deals with things such as the reason why collecting is important again in contemporary art, various methodologies surrounding the remediation as well as restoration of collections, and the change of the museum’s infrastructure according to the change of contemporary art itself.

*Table of contents

-Foreword / Bummo Youn (Director of MMCA)
-Introduction to What Do Museums Collect? / Sunhee Jang (Associate Curator of MMCA)

I. Collecting Others in Contemporary Art Museums: Diversity and Inclusion Beyond Post-Colonial Discourses

-Re-collecting, Re-classifying, Re-ordering: Indigenous Art and the Contemporary Australian Art Field / Tony Bennett
-Museum Collecting: The Origin of the Concept and the Acceptance of Contemporary Otherness / Shan Lim
-What Does the MMCA Collect? / Yup Jang
-Global Korea, Multiculturalism, and Discourses of Otherness: Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Art Exhibits / Kristina Dziedzic Wright
-Unsettling the Center/The Other Divide: Collection Building and the Curatorial Strategy at the National Gallery Singapore / Lisa Horikawa
-Recalibrating a Collection: Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative / Joan Young
-Postmodern Praxis: Representation of the Dilemma in Representing the Other / Hyosil Yang

II. Strategies and Remediation of Collecting in Contemporary Art Museums: Rewriting Art/History, Digital Humanities, and Destination of Artworks

-Why Collect Now? If So, How?: Challenges to Modern and Contemporary Art Museums / Terry Smith
-A Survey of the Exhibition Hello World: Revising a Collection / Sven Beckstette
-When Archives Become Form: Collections, Information, and Access / Emily Pugh
-New Materialities and New Collecting: Future Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art / Beryl Graham
-Life and Death of Works of Art / Sunhee Jang
-Towards a Sustainable Art Practice / Inhwan Oh