The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property

I think through the ways in which you do not have the rise of the museum form or the poetry archive without the acceleration and mutations of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. A friend and a scholar I admire, Jarrett Drake, says he doesn't study museums. He studies slavery and he studies fascism. And I think that I would extend that and say I'm not studying the museum. This isn't a case study of the museum form. I'm really thinking about the ways in which art spaces, in particular cultural spaces, the space of poetry often advertises itself to be an exceptional site, a site that's removed from the world. But it's actually in those very spaces that you can so clearly see the ways in which the trenchant dynamics of racial capitalism but also colonialism manifest.

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Eunsong Kim about her stunning book, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property. It is remarkable in its theoretical conceptualization, argument, and archival work. Kim argues that the beginnings of elite art collection in the United States coincided with the rise of the robber barons and the suppression of the labor movement. She connects this to Taylorism and the idea of scientific management, that further extenuated the rift between the mind and the body, between intellectual activity and labor. Not coincidentally, this distribution of kinds of work created a new distribution of value. In each case, Kim argues, race played a fundamental role. Ranging from the “found” art of Duchamp to the pseudo-Marxist conceptual art of Sierra, Kim eviscerates both pretention and cruelty, and restores the laboring body and what it produces to prominence, along with a truly reinvigorated and capacious sense of the Imagination outside of the constraints of neoliberal aesthetics.

Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. She is the author of gospel of regicide (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 monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property (Duke 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. In 2021 she co-founded offshoot, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

So let's begin with you just telling us—I know this is a big task because you have a big argument, but it's so important. Could you just tell us what your basic argument is? We can discuss the number of cases that illustrate some of the key points, but what's the main argument of your book?

EUNSONG KIM

Yeah, so the main argument of my book is I look at the site of the personal collection or the museum in the US, or the development of the personal collection museum and the rise of philanthropy. And I think through the ways in which you do not have the rise of the museum form or the poetry archive without the acceleration and mutations of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. A friend and a scholar I admire, Jarrett Drake, says he doesn't study museums. He studies slavery and he studies fascism. And I think that I would extend that and say I'm not studying the museum. This isn't a case study of the museum form. I'm really thinking about the ways in which art spaces, in particular cultural spaces, the space of poetry often advertises itself to be an exceptional site, a site that's removed from the world. But it's actually in those very spaces that you can so clearly see the ways in which the trenchant dynamics of racial capitalism but also colonialism manifest.

I use Cheryl Harris's formative legal article, Whiteness as Property, to really think about not just the museum as a kind of segregated space, which it is, but also the various forms that it supports, like the artistic and aesthetic forms. The form of the found object or the forms that become denoted as the elevated form. So there are multi-layered moving parts to the argument. And I guess maybe the last thing that I would say is because I pay so much attention to the rise of philanthropy, which I connect to the personal collection museum by thinking about Carnegie Steel Company and Carnegie, who's considered the father of US and modern philanthropy. I look at his business partner Henry Clay Frick's personal collection museum, now called the Frick Museum, which was recently renovated for millions of dollars and just had a new unveiling. I think about the ways in which both of their philanthropic projects, but also the project of the museum, could only really begin post the violent de-unionization of the steel mills. The ways in which the forms that become elevated through the museum site actually mirror the loss of labor autonomy that we witnessed in the twentieth century, but also throughout the twenty-first century into this moment.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

To me, one of the linchpins of the book is the question of value. What is available to be valued, and that hyper-value inflationary cycles of valuing and value upon value, the intellect of the manager and the disappearance of those things that go into the making. You counter the creation of the Frick and the Homestead strike. Could we talk about those two things in conjunction with your discussion of Taylorism and the notion of scientific management? Especially when this notion comes about that management is presented as a kind of art in itself.

EUNSONG KIM

That's such a wonderful question. And my original conceit was that I would do all of that in one chapter, and then I ended up having to break it apart. So I really like this question because it's one that I was hoping to work through the first time I drafted that chapter. David is pointing to how I pair the acquisition history of what becomes the Frick Collection in New York City with the labor history from the Homestead strike of 1892. The Homestead strike of 1892 is considered one of the most violent strikes in US history. Carnegie and Frick coordinated with the police and also hired private militia, the Pinkertons, to open fire on striking workers and effectively de-unionize that steel mill. And then by the 1900s there are no recognized unions in any of the steel companies that they operate. This was important at the time and into the present because the steel unions were some of the strongest unions, and the things that they were able to organize and win for themselves in a moment when the eight-hour workday was not the law was an eight-hour shift.

The thing that I really noticed reading different labor history books, but also looking through the main newspaper that was reporting on worker strikes, was that it wasn't that Carnegie and Frick's particular Homestead steel plant was not profitable. It had made something like four million in profit that year, and adjusted for inflation that was like a hundred million dollars. They had described in their press releases that this is the thing that has to be done. But I think the wonderful thing about archives and thinking through the past in this moment is you can go and see actually it was not about a profit incentive. Historians across the political spectrum agree that it really is the de-unionization that leads to the philanthropic projects that Carnegie and Frick are known for. Carnegie goes on to build 2,611 libraries. Workers notice that you get a library after he breaks the town's union. Something like 225 communities turn them down. And when I started looking at the acquisition records for the Frick Collection, my thesis was perhaps the two of them were too involved in philanthropic projects, but it was very clear that the acquisitions really begin post the union busting. So it's not just the wealth accumulates, it's the wealth accelerates rapaciously. By the early 1900s under JP Morgan as an amalgamation of the various steel mills and Carnegie selling it, it becomes the first billion-dollar company in the world called US Steel.

None of this is an act of generosity on their part. There's a complete loss of not just worker autonomy, but an understanding, a collective understanding of labor and work, and then it's redesigned and paternalistic in the ideals of the robber barons. The kind of library that Carnegie wanted to build had useful knowledge. When he gave speeches, there are speeches where he says you should not read Shakespeare; you should just have useful knowledge and learn stenography. Simultaneously, his business partner is collecting art. The disparity of what is the life you can live, you want to live... I think the conclusion is supposed to be they are successful capitalists and only successful capitalists can live the life that they want to live and remake society in that way. I lay this history out because I think this argument is too often naturalized in polite society, but also academia. It's in the de-unionized steel mills that we have Frederick Taylor's first experiments for this thing called scientific management, which is not a science. Frederick Taylor was someone who had grown up fairly affluent and rejected going to Harvard, asking a friend of his father's to essentially take a management position at one of the steel mills. He thought the most efficient site of management was the slave plantation. He really thought that he could have a reorganization of the workplace by splitting what he said was mind work to this thing called hand work. So he wanted to have central planning where those who are involved in mind work could decide how the hand workers would operate.

When he was attempting to do all of this, the workers rejected every single one of these experiments. He tried to time the workers to see how fast someone should be doing something, and it was all rejected. But nevertheless, he wrote a book and this became very popular. This is why it's so important to stress this is not a science. It's grounded in an anti-Black legacy of what he thinks the world should look like. Catherine Stone, in one of her reviews of Taylorism and scientific management, describes how foremen had to be retrained to be managers. They wanted to do the work, and so many people had to really be convinced and almost coerced into not doing the thing that was supposed to be beneath them. The naturalization of this worker hierarchy is all part of the argument for the book because I'm really thinking about the rise of conceptual forms like the found object. Taylor has this very eerie line that people will begin to understand management as a kind of art. Harry Braverman is important to invoke at this moment. He wrote this very thorough critique of scientific management and Taylorism called Labor and Monopoly Capital. He situates how it's through this process you can see that there are no unskilled workers; it's that workers are de-skilled. This is a process in which workers who have knowledge are being forced and separated in order to extract the knowledge of production so that there can be a situating of this thing called management that thinks about how to do the work, and then everyone else who does the work.

He says this is a process of de-skilling, and I think that word is important today because I really wonder about the process of de-skilling that's occurring right now. Braverman's not making a nostalgic argument that 40 years ago in capitalism it was better. He's saying there was a different kind of organization of work. If the workers had some ways in which the production was coordinated, it's been completely extracted to central planning, and the process of de-skilling is something he really wants to materialize.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

I just wanted to add a couple of tiny footnotes. The violent suppression of workers by Carnegie and Rockefeller, wasn't that the birth of public relations? This is when public relations comes out. They had Rockefeller go down to the workers' quarters and shake their hands, and so this is the beginning of another kind of management skill, which is management of public opinion. Also when you were talking about de-skilling, there is the interchangeability of labor and workers, but the person who is irreplaceable is the artist. It's the particular genius that they have tapped into that is uniquely theirs, and that capacity is so rare that it has to be protected and represented in the archive, but workers come in faceless. Could you talk about Duchamp and Sierra together? Both wonderful discussions. The Sierra one was horrific. I wasn't sure what was more horrific: him as a person, his self-promotion or the people that promoted him. We need to do Duchamp first because that's necessary for us to understand how horrible Sierra is.

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EUNSONG KIM

The articulation that this is the birth of PR is so important. There's a moment in the early twentieth century where you can track the rise of PR and the beginnings of the training of journalism. Much of the PR that they paid for continues almost voluntarily. I saw an interview of a scholar talking about how the robber barons of the past built libraries and museums, and the robber barons of this current moment don't build anything. They didn't build anything though. Workers who are not named built all of the libraries and the museums. There seems to be an under-examination of the ways in which they were functionary PR objects. Has the PR of the past been so effective that we now naturalize the existence of billionaires so the current ones don't have to build anything? When I looked through the National Labor Tribune when doing research into the Homestead strike and violence directed towards workers, it wasn't just open firing on striking workers. The National Guard was brought in to reopen the plant, and the workers were tried for treason. Carnegie and Frick had sold really bad steel to the US government, but that never resulted in anything except for a fine. The National Labor Tribune has case after case of a worker dying because of workplace injuries from blast furnaces or working conditions that are just so unsafe and unbearable. And I think that with that kind of spectacular violence, the level of PR they would've had to do makes it pretty clear that this was not an act of generosity in any way, shape or form.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

My sense is they don't need to build anything because they destroyed everything. They destroyed the federal government, destroyed the unions and made us happily dependent on them. Think about things like technology and effective altruism. We don't need all these petty donors because we with wealth know best how to serve your interests. And that pivot in PR has now naturalized itself.

EUNSONG KIM

I think that paternalistic grounding is the foundation for this moment. To answer your question on Duchamp and Sierra, the Duchamp chapter will probably be the most contentious for art historians because I am really pushing against formative readings of him. I'm less interested in him as a character and really interested in processes of collecting, institutionalization and wealth accumulation. When looking through the acquisition records of the Frick Collection, I examined the Knoedler Gallery archives and Joseph Duveen's personal papers. Duveen was a private art dealer for all the robber barons brokering between European aristocracy to the new moneyed robber baron class of the US. The National Gallery was essentially Andrew Mellon's private collection. We think of something like the Frick or the Met as old European masters, and then we're supposed to think of someone like Duchamp as a modernist who opens up the realm of institutional critique. He's considered the father of institutional critique and the inventor of found object art and the readymade. I thought it was really fascinating that the Arensberg collection, which was Marcel Duchamp's primary collector, also comes from steel. The financial history of patronage remains consistent. In order to make steel, you need coke, which requires coal. Coal mining depletes the topsoil for a thousand years so that land is more or less not farmable. You can't really talk about these spaces and this art without thinking about racial capitalism and settler colonialism because this is the root of how the authority takes shape. Walter Arensberg's father owned a steel mill, and his wife came from an old money dynasty, so the two of them did not have a conventional job. The Arensbergs and Duchamp worked together to facilitate art shows that became scandalized. The Society of Independent Artists advertised that any artwork submitted would be accepted as a critique of gatekeeping. Duchamp and his patron submitted a urinal turned upside down called Fountain under the pseudonym R. Mutt. The society rejected the submission because they said you didn't make it. Duchamp quit the society, and him and his patron financed a journal called The Blind Man to write a review critiquing the rejection. This is the origin myth of found object art. It uses the language of collectivity and freedom to situate that liberation is not having to make it. But in 1917 New York, there were segregation laws, and the most contentious place was the bathroom, the urinal or the fountain. It doesn't seem random. When I looked at the work of Noah Purifoy and his piece White Colored, which is a drinking fountain and a toilet flipped, you can reread the liberation narrative around Duchamp's Fountain. The freedom is predicated upon racial violence and is a kind of white freedom rooted in anti-Black violence and chattel slavery. Young artists receive the narrative that the museum displays the things that it displays because this is the best work of art. Through acquisition records, you can see how there's nothing meritocratic about this; these are a series of financialized relationships. Duchamp acted as the Arensbergs' primary dealer and met with museum curators over 15 years to figure out which museum will hold the collection. The Philadelphia Museum of Art agreed to the longest conditions, which is 20 years. When Don Fisher donated his collection to SFMOMA, he stipulated 100 years and that 60 percent of what's on display has to come from his collection. Any debate around viewing art based on merit can be fundamentally questioned by the found object.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

You mentioned 1917, and this is also the time that a lot of Black GIs are coming back from Europe demanding democracy. They come back with communism, anarchism and socialism in their heads, and there is a lot of repression of leftist politics at that time. Let's transition from this to Sierra, who is making an argument for a Marxist avant-garde notion of representing the oppression of people.

EUNSONG KIM

Whether it's Duchamp or Sierra, their art is all being laundered through the language of openness. There's a dimension to a de-skilling process or an evasion of labor. Santiago Sierra has had one argument for 20-plus years, which is there is nothing outside of capitalism, so he has to make art that is replications of capitalism. He does this under the banner of ornamental Marxisms, where his dedication to workers is actually a humiliation of the workers. In 250 cm line tattooed on 6 remunerated people, he paid day laborers in Cuba their day rate to have a tattoo artist ink a line straight across their bare backs. The photograph of this scene was made to look like an older grainy document and sold in limited editions. A materialist reading of a limited edition photograph for sale explodes my mind; it was priced at 70,000 euros. Claire Bishop has written that he makes better art because he has better politics and is dedicated to a realistic depiction of the most precarious. At the Tate Modern, he found a group of homeless women and offered to pay them the daily rate at a hostel to face a wall while an audience took pictures of their backs. He has become a triumphant orthodox Marxist, which is a complete failure of a materialist reading. He enacts the humiliation and is insistent that he cannot pay them more than twenty-five dollars because then he would be showing you something outside of capitalism.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

And then an art historian calls them collaborators, right? Even worse.

EUNSONG KIM

Someone called them volunteers, and I do not know how the homeless are volunteering in this performance. What's very clear is this disciplinary move of protecting the artwork and the artist. Across fields you can see a teleological argument where there is a text that is going to be defended, reified and immunized. Auction sites list people who have written about the work, so it ends up aiding in monetary value. Sierra must be protected, so homeless women and day laborers are collaborators. He wanted museum staff to take off their shirts and line up according to their salaries. He could only get the maintenance and janitorial staff; curators just said no. Art historians defend him, saying participants don't seem to mind, but this ruins the thesis that he is brave for showing us cruelty.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

It's under the guise of empowerment, but it's actually so disempowering. You couldn't go and see a homeless shelter and see those things with your own eyes; you need him as the mediator, and that gives it the political punch.

EUNSONG KIM

I wonder about the theory of change. Do you need to see violence for the violence to be transformed? We're living in a world where you can see constant images of a genocide, and it does not seem to stop the violence. Sidiya Hartman pointed out how it perhaps leads to naturalization. Sierra really is the contemporary manifestation of the artist-CEO and artist-manager. This has nothing to do with making anything; it's really about him crafting a song for you to learn something. I situate neoliberal aesthetics as the insistence that nothing else but this capitalist present can be depicted, fundamentally suppressing anything emergent or countering.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

Talk about the anti-Vietnam War protest at the Whitney. It's such a good illustration of the core of the book.

EUNSONG KIM

In 1969, the Guerrilla Art Action Group dumped red liquid on the floors of the Whitney, repeating that the place was a mess from war. The only person who approached them was a member of the maintenance team, and the artists refused to speak to them, demanding a museum director. They left the paint for the workers to clean up. I compare this to the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, where artists wondered why their solidarity with a labor coalition wasn't considered an art performance. The museum responded by fundamentally shutting them down. Both scenes depict an agreed-upon boundary: the artist is a manager, not a worker. Have artists been de-skilled? The institution is skilled in the procedure of co-optation and depoliticization. Once you start active labor organizing, you're a threat to the institution, and they won't recognize that as a performance.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

I thought about grad student organizing. Are they workers or students? The university can cut and parse and redistribute either of those to their benefit.

EUNSONG KIM

One of the reasons you and I can't unionize is because private university professors are considered managers, not workers. The identification with the manager position is fascinating because the unskilled worker category is really situated as replaceability, while managers are supposed to be irreplaceable. I teach a Race and AI class. I told the students I cannot partake in the de-skilling of your mind. I am very worried that what this does is not just a form of alienation from labor, it's an alienation of self and thought.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

We have just barely scratched the surface of this amazing book. It aggregates evocative details into a really powerful argument about the separation between the body and the mind, and the way that we've come to accept the primacy of one over the other. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

EUNSONG KIM

Thank you so much for having me, David.