Simon Knell

© Simon Knell, all rights reserved. From Simon J. Knell. 1999. ‘From here to eternity? Creating a future for museum collecting’, in Ku, Ping-Hsing, (ed.) Proceedings of the International Academic Conference a Prospect to the Twenty-first Century Visual Art, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, 29-31 December 1998.

Introduction

Museums are in the business of history. They are also its product. Holding a resource gathered by successive generations they give us a clear picture of the future implications of continuing the collecting practices of the past. These have not changed radically over the last 200 years. Indeed, our predecessors would have no difficulty recognising the modern collecting problem. They too had faced it, often within a few years of the establishment of their institutions. Then, doyens of the embryonic profession, such as William Flower, warned against the blinkered view of museums as simply institutionalised collections. For Flower it was not the collection which formed the central resource or most distinguishing feature of the museum but rather its staff (Flower 1898, 12; Knell 1996, 38-9). Such lessons, despite repeated delivery, have never been learnt; Flower’s contemporaries continued to collect unabated with little thought given to motive or implication. The process continues today, and voices from within the profession echo similar messages. Effective staff provision for collecting remains a minor consideration for most museums

Only as ‘curators’ metamorphosed into ‘the profession’, have museums begun to know the true nature of their glorious past. In the 1980s and early 1990s a number of British reports were published which caused surprise and consternation (Doughty 1980, 1981; Williams 1987, Lord et al. 1989, Ramer 1989, Storer 1989, Kenyon 1992). Their publication transformed the profession’s view of itself and its abilities to perform its custodial duties. Glorious histories had skirted around the realities and consequences of past amateurism, monument building and an irrationality of provision, preferring instead to document the more noble qualities of unfunded dedication, the pursuit of natural knowledge and so forth. These reports revealed disorder and neglect which it has subsequently been possible to show had been the norm of museum operation rather than a modern lapse (Knell 1996, 29-56). Resourcing and managing collecting has, historically, been such a problem that few museums have effectively achieved their core goal to create a three-dimensional archive from which all else flows.

By the time these reports appeared the professionalisation of museum work was already well-advanced and transforming the way museums communicated with, and educated, their publics. The transformation of collection management had also begun. The establishment of the conservation profession, the development of museum studies training, the spread of information science and technology, the rise of specialist curatorial groups with professional rather than purely academic concerns, and the integration of policy into working practices, all influenced views of how collections should be managed. Of these the development of collecting policies might be seen as having greatest impact in the area covered by this paper. These altered the way museums viewed their mission and how they met the challenge of creating collections.

In 1996, the Department of Museum Studies at Leicester University organised an international conference on museums and the future of collecting. This brought together the views of academics and curators from a wide range of disciplines, from North and Central America, India, Europe and Africa (Knell 1999a). It was apparent from those who attended that this was a topic of great professional concern. The aim of this paper is to explore the main conclusions of this significant body of research in an attempt to discern any useful trends or messages that might also inform institutional collecting in the broad range of museums concerned with the visual arts, whether they take a contemporary or historical perspective. The approach is inherently cross-disciplinary and institutionally oriented, it aims to discern common concerns of museums rather than pursue the more frequently addressed issues of connoisseurship, authentication or the art market. 

Here the visual arts are treated as yet one other aspect of human activity which museums are determined to preserve. Do the visual arts exist within this cross-disciplinary world? They so often appear to occupy a separate and distinct cultural niche from other disciplines in terms of perspective, audience and status. But determining what is meant by the visual arts is itself rather problematic for museums. This is because they are often culturally defined. Objects belonging to the Chinese visual arts may, for example in Britain, be found in archaeological, ethnographic, decorative art, design, fine art and social history museums. Each of these museums has different perpectives on collecting, research and interpretation. Thus determining criteria for collecting is difficult. But this problem extends beyond simple discipline boundaries. A number of authors have illustrated the deeper complexities – both psychological and semiotic – which affect the meanings of objects and therefore individual perspectives on how they might be collected (refs Duclos, Lawson, Dominy, Pearce etc). For some, objects in museums become vehicles uniting space and time, they can be used to create powerful arguments for identity and raise issues concerning the control of knowledge. In countries subjected to past invasion collections remain as remembrances of home for some but also symbolic of colonisation for others. What is representational is also confrontational. These are issues and interpretations which infuse all cultural property regardless of discipline. They remove objects from purely academic discipline defined constraints (see, for example, Messenger 1989, Duclos 1999, Dominy 1999).

There are more obvious similarities. The visual arts, for example, share a contemporary perspective with science and with anthropology. Collecting, managing and presenting material in each case poses new challenges for museums whether the subject matter be Damian Hirst’s butchered cows, nuclear power or the ancestral dead of other cultures.

There is also some unity in the way different disciplines communicate with their publics in museums. Despite the strong aesthetics of the visual arts, all museum objects share a need to provide visual stimulus, whether a Gauguin, a Ju ware bowl of the Sung Dynasty or a dinosaur egg from JiangXi, China. The human emotional response to this diverse range of objects can be surprisingly similar.

Even scholarly interest in the histories of art, science or society shares similar datasets, methodologies and viewpoints. Interdisciplinary boundaries, if appearing rigid and distinct on the one hand, have another side which shows much that is shared. At a most basic level all museum collections have to survive in the same economic and governmental systems.

The collecting problem is one such shared problem. It is seen in the form of omission and over-representation. In terms of process it arises from a curious marriage between a lack of constraint and irrational constraint. It reflects an urge to acquire and represent but one blinkered by academic abstraction and tokenism. A social phenomenon: ‘highly idiosyncratic, exceedingly complex and in some degree, quite irrational cultural-behavioural development’ (Alsop 1982, 1).

Rational and irrational constraints

If museums are continuing a tradition, as they seem to be with regard to collecting, then they need to prove its contemporary validity. Inevitably this comes down to the business of creating histories. Museums are gathering and communicating the material culture of our social, artistic and natural history. Even as collectors of contemporary practice they are inevitably writing histories. This differs slightly from the aims of the founders of the museum movement. They saw material possessions as having a durability which would extend actions (and names) beyond the human lifetime. Often they were attempting to freeze contemporary practice or discovery but ultimately all would become histories. If they were writing histories, then these were primarily of themselves. Collections have this indelible link with time, many really have become vehicles for immortalisation, as indeed the collectors intended and as the great histories of collecting have supplied (Knell 1999b). The eternal was never far from the minds of those who collected. In 1968, Lord Eccles reflected on the fact that a collection had accompanied Tutankhamun into the afterlife: ‘By doing so he has gained a kind of immortality, the hope for which may have something to do with collecting even today’ (Eccles 1968, 1). Posterity continues to occupy the vision of those dedicated to servicing those collections in a professional capacity today. The attraction of the work is in part that it has supposed longevity. Indeed, a major cause of inertia to change in museums derives from this legacy of the past. In Britain’s great museum building age (1820-1850) this was inextricably tied to establishing personal monuments. As immortal presences they have become immovable obstacles to rethinking such fundamental concepts as collecting.

Tradition inevitably feeds this inertia. The curatorial system is one imbued with its own mantras, it is a closed and exclusive world. By its very definition all curatorship holds elements of conservatism: it forms a tradition, it determines a tradition, its goal is continuity. This inertia is magnified by an inadequacy of diet – too many museums are, and always have been, starved of resources. 

Over the same period many collections have moved from being private to public possessions; from personal achievements to organisations ruled by politicians. The result of this is rather more complex. Nations and communities have found themselves responsible for something they did not create or invent; in possession of a collection removed from its founding purpose. The museum now becomes a defining factor in cultural identity, conveying a nation’s or community’s learning, taste and sophistication. But these are concepts that were also in the minds of the founders and indeed the principles upon which cultural monuments are traditionally built. As such popularism can be problematic and redefinition risky, even if a significant proportion of the population might still believe many museums are still peopled by men such as Henry Woodward, who, as President of the British Museums Association in 1900, stated ‘the “man in the street” did not at present seem to be a very hopeful subject in London. He came into museums chiefly for warmth and shelter, and usually brought a good deal of dirt in with him’ (Woodward in Manton 1900, 75). There are, of course, museums which have grasped the nettle, and transformed themselves and in so doing redefined what museums are really about and what collections should be gathered to make this possible. Many of these are museums which have little international presence.

Even when museums have entered into a world of rationalism, the response for collecting has rarely been rational at all. The key influences in making museums aware of their situation have been financial. The last three decades of the twentieth century have witnessed successive periods of world recession which brought crises in government funded and independent museums. Few avoided cuts, many lost staff and some closed (See, for example, Butler 1997, 378; Culotta 1993, 1584; Seymour, 1994). Museums which had survived on hidden costs and professional camaraderie were now faced with a new financial reality; the cost of maintaining collections (which in fact had never really been fully resourced) could no longer be ignored.

Inevitably museums were to faced with further financial regulation, with an economist’s perspective which looked at the mission of these institutions not in terms of quality of service but costs per head – a sense of ‘corrosive cynicism’ prevailed (Rimel reported by Weil, 1994). Amongst the many areas of museum operation this performance measurement appeared to have particular application in collections, and the work undertaken on them. Such things it appears can easily be converted into vital statistics. The use of numerate analysis in museums seems, by its very nature, to bring scientific objectivity to processes and events which are otherwise difficult to define or summarise. ‘Good accounting is not the tyranny of grey men, but a clear profile of what you have been doing and a projection of what you may do in the future. (Somers Cocks 1997). But figures do not make facts; they can be ill-conceived, wrongly used and misunderstood. As supposed facts they live a life of their own, quoted by (or at) those who do not understand them and it is this rather than broader conceptual doubts about the methodology which should cause concern. (Of course, museums also play the statistics game and use figures to sell or promote their achievements – as justification for their existence – to their trustees and public). Some have questioned the statistician’s ability to define quality (Museums Association 1994) or the intangibility of the product of museums (Weil 1994), but equally the approach brings no comprehension of such underpinning concepts as service, patrimony, community, expertise, the long-term, and so on. How often are quoted figures given these provisos? It is not so much a weakness of concept but a frailty of interpretation. In so many ways the approach, however laudably or realistically conceived, is capable of echoing the irrationality of 1970s cost-benefit analysis where human and environmental costs were quantified in monetary terms.

However, such numbers fuel political, and therefore management, decisions. As Barbro Bursell (1999) complains, simple number definitions can have serious implications for what museums are permitted to collect and when number summaries are available more complex arguments remain unheard. In this case, the Swedish Samdok organisation which approaches the documentation of contemporary society (which includes collecting objects) with great rationality, finds its hands tied and the archive produced inevitably corrupted.

Financial constraint leads to omission which can be reflected in a number of ways in collections. Bursell, for example, asks if size and number are valid constraints on collection. But this is merely the tip of the iceberg as value, fragility, age, and social, religious and political associations can also lead to non-collection. Judging what has been omitted often relies considerably on hindsight. Zarka Vujic (1999) argues that in time of war as much as possible has to be collected; the process of evaluating what to keep can take place later. Those collecting contemporary art share this view. They argue that retrospective analysis enables the discernment of objects of key art historical value. Of course, such analyses are equally likely to create omissions and really fail to understand how art historical (and other) knowledge is created. Art histories are the result of academic discourse, of which one key aim is to seek out and expose omission, to bring into the spotlight that which has been ignored or left unseen. A reliance on retrospect is dangerous, as Graham Dominy (1999) shows. The moment apartheid began to crumble in South Africa a rapid amnesia took hold. If the moment was not seized it was lost. Even if material was collected a conscious decision had to be made to record its contemporary significance because even an awareness of this fades with remarkable rapidity.

Professional feelings about the relationship between collecting and collections include much that is illogical. A belief that a collection, to which nothing is being added, is dead or that a collection, which is not in use, is not worth house room, does not stand up to scrutiny. Collections are long-term investments, our views are so often illogically short-term (driven by political and career cycles). The problem is perhaps that the collection is perceived as a product – a fruit. But, of course, a fruit is simply a vessel holding the seeds of the next generation. Collecting need not be continuous or even intermittent. The collection exists outside of the process which feeds it and determines its content and quality.

But constraints on collecting have always existed even though most are not articulated. Perhaps most fundamental is the issue of museum space. Museums do not usually gain new stores by a process of planned expansion but by one that involves bursting at the seams and a prior period of crammed constraint; a kind of metamorphosis with all the risks and structural changes that involves. And if collecting can be physically constrained it can also be reversed. Deaccessioning, something which is essential to rational resource management, is more likely bring an inbred reflex from the profession. Museum staff have long been indoctrinated with arguments in favour of the growth and retention of collections. Using well-chosen examples justification is simple and the collection remains largely unquestioned, if not entirely understood. We do after all have a complex relationship with our material culture, the importance and potential of which, in the form of collections, is easy to demonstrate. These professional beliefs have led to the creation of an entity which possesses even greater immutability than the museum itself. For it is not the museum building which many museums protect with perpetuity clauses but the collection at its heart (ICOM 1987, 4.1; Briat and Freedberg 1991; Museums Association 1996, 2a). What we erect is a blanket defence of collections, protecting the concept rather than examining the true nature of the collections we have in our care or the processes by which they are created. By selecting champions – we could choose a whole host of Master painters, for example – we ring fence the territory. Nudds and Pettitt’s (1997) defence of natural history collections arose from similar concerns. Here a fear that collections might be valued as financial assets began rumours and stories about ‘selling off the family silver’. What results from these professional insecurities is entrenchment: religion as opposed to good questioning theology. The circularity of the argument becomes such that the main reason for retaining an item is that it exists in the collections in the first place. If no process of selective evaluation has taken place in advance of acquisition – as has often been the case (except at a superficial level) – then the very idea defies logic. Slowly museums are adopting a more liberal approach aware of the dangers, particularly of the ‘flood gates opening’ and a mass exodus of material resulting as a result of politically motivated rationalisation.

Defining policy

These issues are important because collecting cannot move forward without also realistically examining the whole cycle of acquisition, retention and disposal, and understanding why we perceive collections as we do (for one discipline’s view on this see Society of Museum Archaeologists, 1993). It is time, perhaps, for the profession or curators (as a fraternity of collectors) to examine that part of the collecting process which Susan Pearce has determined as being hidden from view. The collecting process is a creative exercise and carries with it the same subjective, emotional and psychological influences. ‘This sort of enquiry, concerned with the collector, has been ironed out of rationalist, modernist study which describes it in pejorative words like “anecdotal”, “personality cult making”, and “soft”’ (Pearce 1999; see also Alsop 1982, 20 for criticism of the intellectual focus of the visual arts). But, of course, this very approach underpins history making in the arts and the sciences – its softness has developed a new edge; only recently have we begun to consider collections beyond the purity of their subject matter or the grandeur, wealth and brilliance of their creators.

What is seen as removing museums from the reaches of chaos is the collecting policy. This document encapsulates a major aspect of the professionalisation of museum practice in recent decades: the shift towards intellectualising (thinking about) that practice. Activity is now built out from a firm philosophical and intellectual (rather than simply theoretical) base; developed from museum studies in universities, museums and elsewhere. But collecting policies do not totally release the profession from collecting anarchy as any perception of this is heavily influenced by viewer perspective. Individual museums may have ‘found themselves’ through the process of policy development but they will not have done so entirely, for museums do not operate in isolation. At high resolution many collecting policies do not provide any framework for defining collecting philosophy – they focus on object acquisition rather than the methodologies available to achieve the same intellectual end. Objects, rather than knowledge, dominate. At low resolution, a thousand museums pursuing their own policies (regardless of how much notice they take of their direct neighbours (ICOM 1987, 3.4)) remains anarchic.

The primary constraint adopted by collecting policies for many disciplines is one determined by the geopolitical definition of the museum’s ‘community’. But is this appropriate for all disciplines? If human experience now extends globally (as it long has) what is the collecting role of a community-based museum? Is an effective resource likely to arise out of the unplanned (but hoped for) diversity of approach embodied in the current collecting ‘free market’ where all museums pursue their own isolated goals? Surely the aim of reviewing collecting activity is to move beyond this or at least to understand what it means more clearly. To move away from the simple gathering of isolated tokens, and towards a more integrated understanding of the collecting mission of the museum infrastructure as a whole. This does not, by the way, imply the need for a ‘grand plan’ or the dominance of a single perspective.

The problem with any overarching approach to the objectives of museums is the potential for over-generalisation. The route by which art, archaeological, historical, natural history material enters museums, for example, is varied. Specialists from each would be able to prove the rationality of at least a part of what goes on but if the broad cross-section of the profession which met in Leicester in 1996 is anything to go by, satisfaction is rare. Archaeology worldwide, for example, which can claim more reasoned activity than many disciplines, still has astronomical problems with the size of archives, the documentation of backlogs, preserving exposed monuments, discipline fragmentation, pillaging and site destruction and so on. And archaeology does contribute to the record of the visual arts whether in the form of Chinese grave goods or the excavation of 18th and 19th century potteries around the UK ceramics capital at Stoke-on-Trent. Are the fine and decorative arts any different, is collecting any more constrained or controlled? Is acquisition sustainable? Is it forward looking or reflective? Does it capture the mainstream and neglect the peripheral? Is it reflecting the perceived traditions of art history or being reactive to such notions? Any future strategy must be sufficiently forward looking to achieve this and sufficiently flexible to meet the needs of a diversity of disciplines, materials and users – to accept that the intellectual boundaries of the past will not be the boundaries of the future. Where collecting involves the destruction of context – true of collecting antiquities, items from the natural world and just about all else – then wider issues of conservation are involved (O’Keefe 1997) and sustainability takes on a more complex meaning.

The intellectual meaning of material culture is constantly changing – not simply progressing in depth but changing in perspective. Collections of all kinds are now being removed from their traditional discipline constraints in a process of contextualisation which is fashionable in history, particularly in the history of science and ideas. Museums and collections were previously perceived as part of the wallpaper of history – seen but not observed. Even within art history the emphasis has been on artists and works, not places of exhibition or creation. Now, museums and collections are attracting academic interest in areas of historical research which had previously ignored them. The study of art in culture, for example, is now bringing new insights into the functioning of past societies (see for example, Wolff and Seed’s (1988) use of art to interpret the place of the nineteenth century middle classes).

The development of a future strategy can begin nowhere but in a co-ordinated survey of existing collections. It would be too easy (were the rules by which we play not perceived as immutable) to establish new rules, ‘shift the playing field’ and dismiss the legacy of the past as embodying an inappropriate philosophy or methodology. There are many examples of surveys of museums but few attempt to determine collecting strategy. An example outside of the visual arts, at the Canadian Museum of Nature, illustrates the approach. Here staff undertook a bulk statistical analysis of the representation of plant and animal groups in museum collections across the country (Gagnon and Fitzgerald 1999). It revealed strengths and omissions, and in so doing indicated future directions for collecting and the research required to intimate needs in detail. The same approach could be taken for Chinese porcelain of a particular type. The process is not one of trying to catalogue the total surviving resource but rather to determine what is in public hands and therefore outside of the marketplace and guaranteed a chance of survival. The process is simple, or so it seems, but in reality conceals much complexity. But on the face of it the visual arts have the structural taxonomic advantages which are shared by the natural sciences and archaeology but which history seems not to share. What the Canadian data also indicates, by the baldness of the figures, is the need to gather other equally important quality attributes (such as data richness, completeness, state and method of preservation, and so on). Lists of objects in collections mean little without this. All museums are seen to hold great riches until we begin to ask such qualitative questions. Even within the arts there are aspirations for the objectivity of science: ‘The professional regards taste as a vague, ambivalent characteristic; he tends nowadays to profess scientific detachment…; “He must arrange and categorise with Linnaean assiduity” to fill his gaps, to be representative, ultimately to educate’ (Hermann 1972, 20). But scientific objectivity is simply an illusion, science too follows fashion, moves by irrational hunches and chance, is subject to the vagaries of the human condition. Those disciplines which have strong taxonomic structures are, of course, constrained in their thinking by those structures – this is clearly the case in art history.

The knowledge

Examinations of collector and donor profiles so often reveal a common ‘understanding’ of the collecting process, regardless of the period one examines. This is an understanding primarily determined by personal needs and ambitions and follows a model of patronage centuries old which was an inherent part of the raison d’etre of museums. But in a more rational world it is not the desires of the great collectors that solely concern us, but more often the proactive collecting of museums and galleries themselves. In this context, collector profiles of professional staff would be particularly illuminating, and indeed where this has been done it reveals, not unsurprisingly, that every member of staff has his or her own unique set of collecting criteria. This is not a reference to individual methods of authentication (although these also vary) but rather issues affecting what should be added to the collection. Here, authenticity alone tells us nothing unless we define how that information is to be used.

Such approaches expose the transience of interest and the impossibility of attempting to define or track the contemporary or past meaning of collections. Ideally current interest should affect current collecting policy. This is not because collections form useful sociological documents of the periods in which they were created, but because only by this means will we know and understand the purposes behind collecting. The problem with this approach is that it can create rather narrowly defined collections, perhaps incapable of meeting the multidisciplinary needs of the future. It is another case of collecting following fashion but is anything better possible?

We see these same processes in existing collections as some, through research or promotion, are transformed in importance. In the postcolonial period the large ethnographic collections removed from the Pacific region have become both the source of conflict but of rebuilding relationships where the anthropologist is transformed from dominant master to deferential servant. The symphonies of Maler underwent this same process and similarly the discovery of the enigmatic conodont animal fossil transformed a smudge on a rock into one of the modst significant indicators of the history of life (Aldridge and Purnell, 1996; Knell 1991; 1997).

These are issues which affect existing collections but which need to be considered in the formulation of a collecting strategy. At its simplest level object acquisition must meet the need for multifaceted use in the future. But this presents another problem: assumptions about the value of objects are often poorly informed. Few facets are taken into account, particularly if the person undertaking the evaluation is tainted by preconceptions (as we all, to some degree, are). Indeed is it possible to have an entirely holistic view? David Phillips (1997:32) charts the trend in connoisseurship which has placed the object inherent over the experiential. Stephen Weil disentangles this concept which so much lies at the heart of art museum operation. The art museum is arbiter of excellence, participating in the marriage of quality and taste. Weil uncovers the false and changing beliefs which underpin these ill-defined notions (Weil 1995, 81-123). Frank Hermann’s (1972, 5-6) purely historical perspective sees a contained market where ‘it is almost impossible to discover significant objects that are either underrated or overlooked’. His view is collector-oriented and rather narrowly defined and is rather contradicted by his awareness of a market which diversifies and changes with taste and fashion. It arises from conservatism in the collector fraternity which itself comes from an emphasis on investment (see, for example, Walker 1974, xiii).

The art museum is often seen as creating worth. As the primary venue for the display of an artistic career, it becomes a three-dimensional curriculum vitae for some. Rather that reflecting art history it is part of the process of defining it, of saying what is important, as validator of artistic achievement. No other museum discipline shares this position, though all to a degree infer statements about what should be valued. Althoguh it is rarely recognised all museum disciplines rely to a large degree on connoisseurship, a skill which unites disciplines and dates back to when painting, poetry and geology, for example, were close intellectual and cultural cousins. In the arts the museum holds considerable influence over production, artists wish to be accepted, they want their works to enter permanent public collections, even if to achieve this requires acts challenging established or accepted practices. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London gathered work from around the world in order to teach good design to the manufacturing crafts but inevitably such influence cannot be so constrained. 

Importance, then, comes from selection by a noted arbiter (determined by them rather than the art itself), it has been described as a kind of one-upmanship (Herman 1972, 7) which is certainly prevalent in all collecting arenas and can, of course, arise from academic discourse. As one art curator put it: ‘When I have bought pictures myself…I have usually purchased work of living painters. I find it exciting to bet on a young and undiscovered artist, to know my backing may help him…’ (Walker 1974, xvii). As a participant in the art circus, the museum cannot also be the independent authority of the authentic (Phillips 1997, 25) or worthy. Art museums are ‘tastemakers’ (Walker 1974, xviii) even if the taste that follows is one typified by rebellion.

Richard Dunn (1999) analyses the changing status of objects in the V&A, showing how objects go in and out of fashion with academic study, changes in public taste, the fluctuating art market and so on. This is true of all collections even those rooted in contemporary science. It obviously complicates the assessment of existing collections but need it present a problem at the point of collection? 

Significance if broadly conceived is a transient property – perhaps secure in the more conservative or established sections of art historical study but difficult to pin down in the contemporary scene. Once defined, however, an element of importance will be retained by an object even if it is later discredited. Hermann summarises the history of art collecting as ‘the amalgam of taste, flair, fashion, patronage, connoisseurship, financial acumen, affluence and occasional flamboyance’. Fashion arises from a single or few adventurous souls who invest in material not then considered as worthy, which by positive review is turned into a fashion and market prices consequently rise. Bu shouldn’t this notion of fashion be deemed irrelevant to museums, unless it is determined by the academic process, or where the art museum is also attempting to write a social history of public taste.

This process of evaluation, then, can be pragmatic and reasoned but never rises above raw approximation. It should not be confused with authentication as this feeds into an established value system; the issue here is defining and establishing those values; placing boundaries around collecting. It is a process at the heart of collecting but also every other museum activity involving objects. The process is beset with obstacles and illusions. For those who wish to attempt to understand and rationalise it, it is a black hole. Take, for example, the twin deceivers ‘unique context’ (or in the visual arts ‘uniqueness’) and ‘potential use’. Valid criteria for collecting or simply happy companions for the indecisive? Both define everything and therefore nothing. They are words used to justify the retention of objects, they also give blanket purpose to all collecting. They define what we cannot know and what as a result worries us considerably, and with good reason but can they really be the basis for a rational system of collecting? 

Pursuit of context

Here, in a number of contributions to the Leicester conference the words ‘consciousness’ or ‘self-conscious collecting’ entered the dialogue. There needed to be a recording of the very reasons for acquiring an object.  This is also at the heart of other’s desire for a return to connoisseurship and the raison d’être of Sweden’s Samdok. It is embodied in the dilemma facing cultural historians: whether to pursue the object or the context from which it comes. Other disciplines resolved this issue long ago. In geology and archaeology, for example, the pursuit of context has long been established as best practice but despite this practitioners of both strategies exist, particularly in the amateur collecting communities feeding material into public museums.  What function does it play in art collecting?

Pursuit of context is far from easy as it must be delineated within a research strategy, a process which is inevitably partly subjective and as exclusive as it is inclusive. Nicola Clayton (1999) has studied those aspects of Western culture excluded from museum representation. The approach reveals the problems of collecting from a diversity of subcultures, from a multidimensional medium composed of a mosaic of identities superimposed one upon the other. No single institution can cope with this complexity, but some have attempted to understand it and confront it. The best example is seen in Sweden where curators join together to document contemporary life in a thematic way. But even here the process of collecting is inevitably destructive of context. In moving objects from their original surroundings they take on other meanings. It is not that we cannot imagine the original context, it is that the context has changed. Phillips (1997, 199), at the end of an extensive exploration of authenticity in the world of art history, comes to the same conclusions. Reviewing an exhibition on childhood he had seen a decade earlier, the communicative elements which once had moved him were no longer authentic messages but devices to conceal an illusion. For Clayton’s youth cultures they move from anti-establishment to mainstream. But a reticence to collect and the shifting nature of politics and society can result in a dislocation between what, in collecting, is possible for acceptable and what is necessary. Clayton’s groups remain out of step (often intentionally so). Similarly in areas of military or political struggle curators face great difficulties in capturing the moment and representing it fairly. Sometimes change is too quick, sometimes too dangerous, sometimes too tragic. 

A way around this problem relies upon placing more emphasis on context and less on the object. The recording media are expanded and object collecting is not the goal but merely one of the products of a much wider process. This is so in Sweden but echoes through a wish of some African museums to leave collections in their original context, preserved in use. In this view gap filling in typological sequences seems inappropriate, merely narrow academic abstraction. To shift the preservation of context into the visual arts, the viewpoint for some material becomes rather different. Unlike other disciplines which collect the material culture of areas of activity centred outside of the museum or collection, large elements of that entering art museums were created for the purpose. Alsop (1982, 16-7) talked of the ‘by-products of art’: art collecting, the art market, art history, art museums, art faking, revaluation, antiques and super-prices. If the museum pursues context then these become the context of the object as much as the artist and the studio.

Several writers see the future of collecting as being determined by the community. Created by a local populace in answer to local contemporary needs. In the same breath they also propose a sharing of the object resource and an end to cultural imperialism. Such beliefs would seem to both endorse and contradict the community view. This is because the term ‘community’ is loaded, representing a collective and an exclusive entity. Much of what is noteworthy in society is found at the interface between communities and collecting needs to reflect this, whether between the warring former Yugoslavians or in South Africa where cultural objects which were once symbolic of a clash of communities now perform a unifying role.

Private collectors form an important part of the community involved in preserving material culture. At present museums take a rather distanced interest in this group. They may be interesting to observe and entertaining to present but can they contribute to the modern collecting mission of art museums? Of course they include among them many wealthy philanthropists who have done much to establish and present, for example, collections of Chinese art around the world. But history has shown in other disciplines that as collecting becomes more rigorous and intellectually focused so the role of the private collector is marginalised. The standpoint is not, however, simply centred on academic purity but more in a belief that the museum represents a preserve while objects in the possession of the private collector remain in the wild, outside of public control, open to the vagaries of the market and fashion. There are examples where co-operative collaboration between public institutions and private individuals have strengthened collecting. Some have used collecting by the local community to drive official programmes studying biodiversity, such as Costa Rica’s INBio, others have utilised local knowledge and possessions to create folk museums. The problem for cooperative collecting in the visual arts is that financial value is such a key attribute of objects. Many are made for the market, they require financial investment. The Victorians used to refer to their wealthy donors as being ‘disinterested’ but in reality no donor was entirely so. In the early years of the nineteenth century the focus of museums being established in Britain and across the empire was on natural history rather than art. This wasn’t simply because natural history was a fashionable subject but because it was affordable – indeed this fed the fashion. Paintings already

had an exclusivity and were largely held in the great houses, on the estates of the gentry and aristocracy (Jackson-Stops 1985). Consequently they remained outside the purview of many of the societies then founding museums perceived as being too costly and unlikely to be donated. Today, some countries (such as New Zealand and Greece) are considering the functions of the private collector of art and antiquities in laws which both regulate but also make provision for their activities (O’Keefe 1997, 31).

Arising out of this interest in the community come issues of ownership. While not wishing to disenfranchise a local community there is a widespread belief within academic communities in both the arts and the sciences, that it really doesn’t matter where an object is, geographically, as long as it is accessible. The view is that such objects are really only held in trust and are truly the property of science or art. But equally there are many that take a counter view, claiming objects as cultural icons even when they were created in other countries and by other nationalities. But this ‘nationalism’ permeates through all levels in society affecting collecting and creating competition. But where national boundaries and international law come into play these issues have even greater complexity (Briat and Freedberg 1991, 69; O’keefe 1997, 34). Inadequate or flexible laws which feed corruption can disenfranchise primary producers and museums. Dealers benefit while museums who are bound by international treaties and conventions, often morally rather than legally (ICOM 1987, 3.2), find themselves disabled by a legal smoke screen.

Conclusion

If we step back from collections and put aside our professional preconceptions we might visualise the collection as a materialistic analogue of the human genome. It represents our past and contributes to our future, and is similarly subject to the effects of mutation. To continue the analogy we might accept that what survives in a collection should be determined by natural selection. Indeed this is what currently happens if resources are not available to service what we possess or are distributed unevenly so that collecting is patchy and intermittent. But here selection is being determined by money and not by the true intellectual ‘environment’ of the collection.

The reason we create collections is because objects retain a multidimensional aspect in a way that no other recording medium does. It is this that gives collections their importance and utility, and also this which makes the definition of a collecting strategy so difficult. Commonsense dictates that collecting must be co-ordinated – this is the key to effective resource management. It cannot be motivated by competition as all this achieves are increased rates of acquisition and duplicated effort. Whether such co-ordination takes place at a local, regional, national or international level is dependent upon the material concerned (along with a host of political and cultural issues). Perhaps greater distinction needs to be made between material gathered to meet interpretative need (whether children’s handling collection or an encyclopaedic reference collection) and that which forms part of archive (though, of course, the two uses may overlap). The idea of centres of excellence remains a viable means of rationalising institutional participation provided it is inclusive rather than a route to exclusivity for the few (as is the case with attempts to establish such a system in Britain at the present time).

Cooperation must encourage wider discussion of collecting methodology, and models exist, such as that developed in Sweden, which provide excellent starting points. Effective collections can only be generated through a research process. The emphasis must shift away from possession of objects and towards intellectual and educational goals. Objects should be collected which, in the context being investigated, can be attributed with an importance which cannot be represented or recorded in any other way. To achieve this museums must lower their defences and begin to see themselves as part of a much wider community investigating art, history, society and the natural world. Collaboration should extend outside of those intellectual and commercial communities simply preoccupied with objects.

The term ‘research’ is used here without suggesting a focus on the production of academic papers but merely to define a very practical process; in museums in Britain and elsewhere it is an increasingly misunderstood concept. It is thus seen in some management circles as being an expendable luxury, when really it offers perhaps the most cost-effective route to collection building and management. Only by this process will collections be created which intertessellate and meet a rationale which is sustainable (and affordable). Research by its very nature thrives on collaboration and forms a kind of self-regulating free market. It is up to managers to decide the form it takes and to manage it, rather than to simply dismiss it.

Such beliefs underline the importance of decisions taken during collecting and of controlling acquisition at source as Bursell suggests. Increasing investment to produce more effective collecting will save money in the long-term and create a better archive. This approach also reduces the need to take difficult decisions about the disposal of existing collections and mirrors the ethical arguments which informed the shift towards preventive conservation in another area of museum practice.

Together these are the principles by which Samdok has tackled contemporary documentation in Sweden. They will also serve to inform collecting from the past and from the arts and sciences. Many museums and disciplines already utilise this kind of methodology, including many of the world’s great art museums though even here the object tends to dominate. The future of collecting then lies more in restraint, rationalism and resource management than in the collector’s natural impulses of taste, flair, fashion and so on. What collecting must not do is simply follow the liberalisation of museums’ educational purpose. Once seen as teaching institutions, but later as places of learning, today this learning is accepted as being largely affective rather than cognitive. Collecting needs to move in a counter direction, currently too loosely defined it needs more rigour, restraint and intellectual focus.

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