even*cleveland: 'what, then, to make of objects?'

'what, then, to make of objects?'

What, then, to make of objects? In a culture being redefined by the way it consumes, what to make of people who collect things, who keep things? What to make of the personal archives, the private universes, the physical stabs at permanence and immortality that collectors create? ... Why do we keep?

William L. Hamilton, "Object Lessons: The New Museum Explores Why We Keep Things." NYT 7/14/2016.

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“The Keeper” is an exhibition dedicated to the act of preserving objects, artworks, and images, and to the passions that inspire this undertaking. A reflection on the impulse to save both the most precious and the apparently valueless, it brings together a variety of imaginary museums, personal collections, and unusual assemblages, revealing the devotion with which artists, collectors, scholars, and hoarders have created sanctuaries for endangered images and artifacts. In surveying varied techniques of display, the exhibition also reflects on the function and responsibility of museums within multiple economies of desire.

The New Museum

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Collections vary in their intentionality; many of us have hundreds of plastic bags stuffed beneath the sink; thousands of casual snapshots dormant in overfull hard-drives. We look happily upon such cached keepsakes even as we consign them to oblivion, sure that someday we will be grateful that we were prepared, that we haven’t forgotten. Museums and archives bear more purposeful gatherings, charting the suppositions that we call science and the mythologies that we dub history in reliquary records and documentary artifacts. Such are the gestures of archives: holding on, making infinite, and striving beyond material mass to reach for answers to the perennial questions of how to remember and how to know.

Nicole Kaack, "Adding One to Infinity: The Keeper at The New Museum." SFAQ 8/10/2016.

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Truly sad I am not getting to see this exhibit in person; I've been devouring online images and the catalog is on my birthday list.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

'what, then, to make of objects?'

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