Rarely do I write blog posts about exhibits that I haven't been to but, "The Keeper" which is up through September 25th at The New Museum in New York City is compelling. If I could hop on a plane or tap my shoes three times and head there before it closed, I would. I found out about the exhibit by accident and had to google it when I got home. I'm still having a hard time picking my jaw up from the floor. I will let the reviews as well as a few photos from the exhibition speak for themselves.
Untitled by Hannelore Baron 1981
"“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."
"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?"
"As an object, single or multiplied, it serves the basic function that collecting — call it hoarding, call it installation art — does. It lets us keep the illusion that we can forever embrace, and be embraced by, what is forever fading away."
Research:
The Keeper-exhibit catalog
The Keeper at The New Museum (through September 25th, 2016) NYC
NYT: Object Lessons: The New Museum Explores Why We Keep Things
and
The Keeper Reviews The Passion for Collecting
“The Keeper” at the New Museum Pays Homage to Objects and Obsessions
Instagram photos
I hope that this post has piqued your interest as much as the exhibit has done to my own curiosity.