Response to James Clifford's "On Collecting Art and Culture"

I found the most interesting parts of James Clifford’s “On Collecting Art and Culture” to be the ideas concerning how culture and art becomes, in one way or another, something to be collected, possessed, and even obsessed over by groups or individuals. Western cultures are singled out most for having a seemingly infinite amount of collections from every culture on the globe. Possessions from a culture, be it the mask belonging to a tribal chief or a bowl that villagers used to wash their faces, are taken out of their original context and given value and meaning as they become cherished and preserved pieces of property in a collection. The motivations behind these collections are given much thought and consideration. An entire country or tribe cannot become an exhibit, so what is preserved, valued, and exchanged becomes the central issue in deciding what is most worthy of being shown. A few small artifacts often must represent an entire culture’s legacy, and these objects have been chosen because someone has deemed them valuable, beautiful, or based on any number of adjectives that makes their display worth the time of the observing public.

One way of culture collecting is referred to as “ethnography,” which highlights the ways diverse elements of a culture are chosen and taken from their original location and given an increased value by being placed in another, such as a museum or gallery. Clifford views these chosen objects as what the collectors deem as deserving to be remembered and treasured. Where Geertz sees “Art" as being tied to the artist’s social class, aesthetics, and ideas about taste, and “art” as a skilled work, craft, or technology, Clifford has his own system for the way culture was seen in the eighteenth century. “Culture” refers to a tendency to the natural growth of living things, while “culture” came to mean what was most valued in a society.

Going into an exhibit or gallery, it is easy to allow a few objects to sum up the heritage of a culture that one knows little about. Ideas about a society’s culture, practices, and beliefs can be summed up without the details, so looking at one’s own private collection might provide better insight into the motivations behind why we collect what we collect. What is it about certain objects that attract us more than others? All kinds of reasoning can be brought to our collections, whether the objects entertain us (music, movies, books), aesthetically please us (art, photographs), help us make a political or moral statement (t-shirts, bumper stickers), or whose value could bring the owner untold riches some day (old comic books and action figures). Personally, I have to an extent collected items for each of these reasons. A collection seen in a museum or gallery is meant to represent an entire people, but our personal collections show who we are as individuals. Walking into someone else’s room is like walking into a small museum where a person’s identity is preserved in its original context.

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