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Collecting ‘the now’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Stephen Bury
Stephen Bury*
Affiliation:
Frick Art Reference Library, 10 East 71st Street, New York, NY 10021, USA
*
Email: bury@frick.org

Abstract

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Is it, should it be, the responsibility of an art librarian to document and collect ‘the now’? There are obvious pros and cons of this – the inevitable value-judgments, the expensive errors of unnecessary acquisition or omission, the labour involved, deviation from the institutional mission, etc. The author explores a personal journey through the acquisition of artists’ books and multiples, defending a role for the art librarian in the interstices of curatorship and the art world as it actually happens.

Type
Research Article
Information
Art Libraries Journal , Volume 38 , Special Issue 3: Special Issue: Artists’ Publications , 2013 , pp. 6 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 2013

References

1. Morris, Catherine and Bonin, Victor, eds., Materializing ‘Sixyears’: Lucy R. Lippardand the emergence of conceptual art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012).Google Scholar
2. Collingwood, R. G., The idea of history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945, rev. ed. 1993), 69.Google Scholar
3. CHELSEA space, www.chelseaspace.org/archive-index.html Google Scholar
4. The process of cataloguing an artist’s book is very helpful in this, including the mundane tasks of measuring the item, counting the pages. See White, Maria...et al., Artists’ books: a cataloguers’ manual (London: ARLIS/UK & Ireland, 2006) and my review, ‘Artists’ books’, The Art Book, 14, no. 1 (2007).Google Scholar
5. Bury, Stephen, ‘1, 2, 3, 5: building a collection of artists’ books’, An Libraries Journal, 32, no. 2 (2007).Google Scholar
6. Bury, Stephen, Artists’ multiples, 1935-2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 52-3.Google Scholar
7. Center for the History of Collecting, www.frick.org/research/center Google Scholar
8. Reidinger, Gerald, The economics of taste, vol. 1 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961), 238.Google Scholar