Lessons in Ownership from the Crucible of Collecting

For hundreds of years, public museums have created knowledge by displaying once-private collections: in the words of Krzysztof Pomian, they show the public to itself. In the last few decades, however, collections and museums have created a new kind of knowledge, the articulation of multiple publics that oppose the ownership and display of their objects. This paper argues that these tensions signal the need for a more fluid approach to object care and possession, one that distills object ownership as meaning-based.

Meaning-based ownership offers an additional form of legally-recognized possession. It neither disrupts nor decenters property law, collections, or museums; collections remain significant loci of education, and the return of objects to victims of theft and looting persists as a powerful tool of redress. This theory posits that the collecting experience can spur an arbitration of control, one that weighs the relative significance of objects between legal owners and constituencies that have no formal claim to them under historical notions of Anglo-American property law. Collectors and museums already engage in preemptive agreements that seek out and win assent from potential stakeholders; this paper proposes formal methods of recognizing those claimants. Narrow examples of such laws exist already in the United States and the United Kingdom, based, respectively, on tribal customs and on the materiality and age of objects. A careful widening of these models can prevent and correct imbalances of power in the identification and enjoyment of objects of multiple and diverse meanings.