The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property
by Eunsong Kim, Durham, NC: Duke, Duke University Press, 2024
In one of my undergraduate lectures, titled ‘Across the Racial Divide’, about the art of the Harlem Renaissance, I begin by charting how the Reconstruction era which followed Emancipation led to a rise in racial violence and segregation, and by the early 1900s, the Great Migration.1 To provide a wider social and cultural context for what was originally called the New Negro Movement, subsequently dubbed the Harlem Renaissance, which ran roughly from the 1920s to the 1930s, I make reference to the Armory Show, staged in New York in 1913. Although lasting barely a month, this international exhibition remains of paramount importance to enduring legacies of modern art’s evolution in the USA. Arguably, no artist more typified this than French-born Marcel Duchamp whose Cubist-inspired painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912) was one among the many hundreds of works included in the show. However, reading Eunsong Kim’s recent book The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property, I now realise I made the most glaring of oversights in not addressing Duchamp’s readymade ‘masterpiece’, Fountain (1917), which, produced shortly after the Armory Show, better demonstrates the relationship between race and cultural politics in early twentieth century American art. I am not alone. Kim notes that ‘when Fountain is discussed, the United States and the context of segregation rarely enter the analysis or even the footnotes’ (106).
More +Excerpt from 'Property Rights' (Book Review)
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