New Challenges for Contemporary Art Collections

Abstract

Professionals in charge of collections of contemporary art that focus on some practices and artistic attitudes that emerged in the sixties and that persist until today, have been forced to take into account previous processes of production and display of an artwork, and to assume the subsequent challenges this artwork will pose when being integrated into a collection. They had to accept that the concept of ephemeral is a forced condition on many instances, that temporality and process are elements that can’t be ignored, and that files and archives generated by artists can be even more important than their own works. As for performance art, they must begin to integrate the idea of “collecting spaces of time”. Artistic practices carried out by artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Tino Sehgal, where strict requirements to have access to the works are imposed by the artists themselves, can be a good reference to follow when thinking out new ways of collecting. In this sense museums of contemporary art must lead and promote this kind of actions, leaving behind obsolete models of collecting.