This book traces the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect, focusing not just on the normative collections of the Western canon, but also on collections that reflect a fascination with the "Other" and the marginal the ephemeral, exotic, or just plain curious.
There are essays on the Neoclassical architect Sir John Soane, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Schwitters, one of the masters of collage. Others examine imperialist encounters with remote cultures the consquitadors in America in the sixteenth century, and the British in the Pacific in the eighteenth and the more recent...

An international movement that followed specific geographical-cultural patterns, Conceptual Art built on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, redefining the institutional and social relationships among production, work and audience in ways which have comprehensively transformed the nature of the art object and forms of artistic practice, both historically and in the present.
Investigating and documenting the histories, theories and forms of Conceptual Art, this timely book, including both established writers and a new generation of art historians, shows that Conceptual Art was a broad movement...