The Keeper Author:Massimiliano Gioni, Ed Atkins, Ydessa Hendeles, Orhan Pamuk, Wilson Bentley, Marguerite Yourcenar, Robert Boyle, Loretta Pettway, Zofia Rydet The catalog for one of the most engaging New York museum shows this year, The Keeper is about obsessive collecting as a mutant species of art-making, a deeply human desire for preservation that leads in one direction to the world’s great museums and in the other to the Collyer brothers. Levi Fisher Ames’s fantastical... more » whittled zoo creatures from around the turn of the last century are worth the price of this book all by themselves. (Randy Kennedy The New York Times)
Foregrounding a passion for images and collecting, ‘The Keeper’ worked to dismantle the presumptions that govern museums and limit our pleasure in commonplace things. (Brian Wallis Artforum)
A [catalogue] that casts a much wider net, that gives weirder and more idiosyncratic work much more room- and makes everything we're used to seeing in museums (and even galleries) seem hemmed in by comparison. (Jerry Salz The New York Times)
[Hilma af Klint's] 15 paintings in "The Keeper" exhibition at the New Museum... form one of the greatest sights in any New York museum right now. (Roberta Smith The New York Times)
‘The Keeper’ shows us that there is more in the category of art than our present system has dreamed of. (Jerry Saltz New York Magazine)
As an object, single or multiplied, it serves the basic function that collecting â call it hoarding, call it installation art â does. It lets us keep the illusion that we can forever embrace, and be embraced by, what is forever fading away. (Holland Cotter The New York Times)
Stacks of over 300,000 drawings, assemblages of collected hair and debris, as well as meticulously hand-carved wooden figurines make up just a few of the items on display in the New Museum’s latest exhibition, 'The Keeper'. It's a show which effectively blends the boundaries between curating, creating, and collecting art. (Carly Ayres Wallpaper)
With over 4,000 objects representing more than two dozen collectors, including contemporary artists making art conceived by collecting, Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s artistic director, and his team of curators have mounted a remarkable series of object lessons about what it means to 'keep,' the relationship of possession to loss, the madness inherent in love, and the undeniable importance of the individual’s voice in recording and interpreting history and its sweep. (William Hamilton The New York Times)« less