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.

"“Eunsong Kim is one of the most original critics of art and poetics. In The Politics of Collecting, she deftly situates conceptual art and experimental poetry—their formal aesthetics, practices of collection, and market logics—within the history of capitalism and colonialism, demonstrating that colonial extraction and expropriation of land and labor are the condition of possibility for museums, archives, and poetry collection.”" - The Intimacies of Four Continents

"“Eunsong Kim’s The Politics of Collecting is a remarkable achievement, deftly weaving museum culture, aesthetics, and Marxist analysis together to grapple with what lies beneath: the pernicious effects of racial capitalism that pervade histories of museum collections. In her case studies, Eunsong Kim examines establishments from the Getty to the Carnegie, the Archive for New Poetry and the Frick in order to consider the production of art collecting as an archive of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and antiblackness. In the depth, elegance, and fluidity of her readings, The Politics of Collecting coalesces into a multifaceted book that only Kim could write.”" - Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual