1

The Act of Collecting

2

The Object’s Voice

3

Whoops, It Broke

4

The Better Mousetrap

5

Plumb Wore Out

6

Taste Changed

7

Owners Lost Faith

8

Owners Lost Interest

9

Owners Grew Up

10

nobody cared

11

Got Lost

12

Part of Something Bigger

13

Used Up

14

Better in the Afterlife

15

A Bad Idea in the First Place

16

Never Made Enough

17

Provisional Utility

18

Made for One Use Only

19

Unintended Survivors

20

Mental Collections

21

So What’s Left?

22

Just in Time

About the Author

From the Author

From the field

From You

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chapter 20

Lists, Mental Collections and Deaccessioning

Lists Mental Collections Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda Shouldn’a Deaccessioned Upgrading and Deaccessioning The Praxis of Collecting

Sign in the Venetian casino, 2005. Cast bronze, and printed plastic, 2005. 18" high. Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Lists, Mental Collections and Deaccessioning muses upon immaterial collections and collections that take up little space (ex: menu errors, invented names, elided words, sign misspellings, locale displacements, New York City fossils, inscriptions in cement). This chapter also considers the extremes of collecting (ex: the Collyer brothers and Andy Warhol), upgrading and selling, trading, giving what no longer matters and the practice as distinguished from the theory of collecting.