chapter 20
Lists, Mental Collections and Deaccessioning
Lists ★ Mental Collections ★ Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda ★ Shouldn’a Deaccessioned ★ Upgrading and Deaccessioning ★ The Praxis of Collecting
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.