James Clifford "On Collecting Art and Culture"

Clifford, James. “On Collecting Art and Culture” in the Predicament of culture: twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1998):215-251. Print.

James Clifford’s piece ‘On collecting art and culture’ primarily examines the social and cultural context of museum collections. In the beginning of the piece Clifford explores James Fenton’s poem ‘collecting ourselves’ which traces the dark side of museums and collecting; the forbidden areas of self (Clifford, 217). It is this desire; the fetish if you will, that I am most interested in, the distancing of the objects original purpose into an object of obsession in its self. Clifford comes down harshly on the fetishist labelling their obsessions as a tabooed path of too-intimate fantasy (Clifford, 217), that a good collector labels and classifies their collection and knows this history (Clifford, 219), sterilising obsession into socially sanctioned pathways. As Clifford suggests “the collection itself – its taxonomic, aesthetic structure – is valued, and any private fixation on single objects is negatively marked as fetishism” (Clifford, 219) in support of his argument Clifford addresses the book ‘on longing’ by Susan Stewart where she says Susan Stewart “the boundary between collection and fetishism is mediated by classification and display in tension with accumulation and secrecy” (Stewart, Susan. On Longing. London: Duke University press (10^th ed. 2007):163. Print.). Stewart though also discusses the collection as a symbol of the self that once objects are no longer defined in terms of their use value in the environment, but are defined by the collection, they instead “serve to subsume the environment to a scenario of the personal” (Stewart, 162). Giving the collection self beyond its academic physicality I believe is important, as it has power to reflect the personal, in the fetishist, as well as social and cultural traits as a whole, that are otherwise buried under their own tangible weight.