What Do Museums Collect?

5 Foreword
7 Introduction to What Do Museums Collect?

I. COLLECTING OTHERS IN CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUMS: DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION BEYOND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSES
17 Re-collecting, Re-classifying, Re-ordering: Indigenous Art and the Contemporary Australian Art Field / Tony Bennett
41 Museum Collecting: The Origin of the Concept and the Acceptance of Contemporary Otherness / Shan Lim
51 What Does the MMCA Collect? / Yup Jang
77 Global Korea, Multiculturalism, and Discourses of Otherness: Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Art Exhibits / Kristina Dziedzic Wright
95 Unsettling the Center/The Other Divide: Collection Building and the Curatorial Strategy at the National Gallery Singapore / Lisa Horikawa 107 Recalibrating a Collection: Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative / Joan Young 119 Postmodern Praxis: Representation of the Dilemma in Representing the Other / Hyosil Yang
II. STRATEGIES AND REMEDIATION OF COLLECTING IN CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUMS: REWRITING ART/HISTORY, DIGITAL HUMANITIES, AND DESTINATION OF ARTWORKS
135 Why Collect Now? If So, How?: Challenges to Modern and Contemporary Art Museums / Terry Smith
161 A Survey of the Exhibition Hello World: Revising a Collection / Sven Beckstette
177 When Archives Become Form: Collections, Information, and Access / Emily Pugh
191 New Materialities and New Collecting: Future Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art / Beryl Graham
207 Life and Death of Works of Art / Sunhee Jang
225 Towards a Sustainable Art Practice / Inhwan Oh

The writings of the thirteen contributors, which include art historians, aestheticians, curators, and authors in Part 1 and Part 2 of this book, contain analysis, criticism, and suggestions on theories and practices surrounding the museum collection. As today's society changes rapidly and develops complexly, contemporary art, which represents such social changes, also continues to experiment with various themes and media. And museums, which flexibly accommodate these arts and mediate with the audience, have no choice but to constantly change their systems. What Do Museums Collect? presents and discusses an agenda that can be expanded into research topics rather than solutions to the problems surrounding museums and collections. I hope that this book will help invigorate researchers' activities for knowledge production regarding this subject.
- Sunhee Jang (Associate Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea), INTRODUCTION TO WHAT DO MUSEUMS COLLECT?

Why do we reveal self-conscious desires for the past which disappears through collecting? Perhaps we want to obtain guidance for the future like Noah. To borrow historian David Lowenthal's expression, it may be that we want to find an "alternative to the present" that is not satisfactory or cannot be accepted.2 Human beings' intentional process wants to give meaning and value to the past that we remember as we look back at the present condition and define the existence of oneself. For this, objects and materials are often used. They become tools of memory that recall past social and personal identities, while at the same time linking today's people with the past and allowing them to fill the intellectual gap.
- Shan Lim, MUSEUM COLLECTING: THE ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF CONTEMPORARY OTHERNESS