1st Edition
Art Collecting and Gifts to Museums An anthropology of donations
Art Collecting and Gifts to Museums questions why private collectors donate their collection, or parts of it, to museums and examines what the implications of this gifting process might be.
Presenting case studies from Europe, North America, East Asia, and the South Pacific, the book is concerned with both elite and popular collections and examines the act of donating art from the collector’s point of view. Demonstrating that art museums depend on donations from private collectors, Paul van der Grijp emphasises that it is crucial to understand the psychological, sociological, economic, and educational motivations for gifting works of art to institutions. Taken together, the chapters argue that collectors donate to museums because the latter represent an imagined community, to whom they would like to bestow a sacred gift. Private collectors are, Van der Grijp maintains, motivated to ensure the immortality of their collections and, ultimately, to preserve some memory of their own lives in the process.
Art Collecting and Gifts to Museums will be of interest to researchers and students engaged in the study of museums, culture, art, anthropology, history and sociology.
Introduction; Part I Motivations; 1 The self-enhancement motive; 2 Augmenting social status; 3 The investment motive; 4 Transmission of knowledge; Part II Museums; 5 Collection or museum; 6 Museums in east asia; 7 Gifts to museums in taiwan; 8 Founding a collection museum; 9 Museums and the imagined community; Part III Private collectors; 10 Early modern art collectors;11 Donations by collecting artists; 12 Asian art and culture; Conclusions on donations
Biography
Paul van der Grijp is Emeritus Professor in Anthropology of the University of Lyon and a former researcher of the Centre for Research and Documentation of Oceania in Marseilles and the Institute of East Asia Studies in Lyon. He conducted lengthy periods of fieldwork in the South Pacific and East-Asia.
