Collecting strategies: Ephemera

Collecting ephemera is always difficult.  How do you live in the historical moment and yet stand outside it enough to be able to know what will have value?

The Victoria and Albert Museum, one of England's premier museums with a long history of collecting contemporary design, has developed a collecting strategy they're calling "Rapid Response Collecting".  In their press release:

The objects [which include the toy below, the first 3d printed gun, a pair of jeans from the factory that collapsed in Dhaka Bangladesh, Katy Perry false eyelashes, a new designed cable for taller and faster elevators] have been recently acquired as part of the Museum's new approach to collecting contemporary design and architecture, known as 'Rapid Response Collecting'. This new strategy will help the V&A engage in a timely way with important events that shape, or are shaped by design, architecture and technology. Regularly updated with new objects, it will be the first gallery in the Museum that can be responsive to global events, technological advances, political changes or pop cultural phenomena that have an impact on art, design and architecture. The long-term result will be a permanent legacy of objects in the collection that will help future visitors and researchers to access material culture in the 21st century.

Ikea soft toy, now in V&A collection

What's behind this strategy?  It seems to me motivated by a couple of things:

1. The very real pace of ephemera in modern cultural life.  Modern packaging and things like lottery tickets, photos, etc.--all the sort of things collected by the Ephemera Society of America, in fact--are transient.  They aren't designed with the idea of lasting forever, the way a painting or sculpture is designed to transcend its own time.

2. The pressure of a consumerist society which manufactures so many material objects.  With so many brands of soap and so many postcards and advertisements, we're simply hard pressed to choose and so there is the desire to collect everything.  In fact, this article brought the new strategy to my attention and it made the point:  
"It’s great that a huge, historical museum like the V&A wants to engage with the present in such a tangible way, but what’s been announced about Rapid Response Collecting so far seems like a random jumble more than an articulated vision. Hopefully the curators will pull everything together in a more meaningful way in the permanent museum gallery dedicated to the program, which opens to the public July 5."

3. The connection between the museum and culture as a driver of culture.  To what extent does the Museum create value by owning and displaying an object?  To what extent do companies like Ikea design and promote to reach BOTH mass and exclusive markets?  I'm clearly NOT a design historian precisely because I look at this Ikea toy and think: why collect this and not Ikea fabrics?To what extent is one MORE culturally representative?  Do I really understand the wider culture from the corner in which I'm standing?

4. Pockets! The fear here is that if you w...a...i...t...to see whether the doll will be the next Cabbage Patch, you might not be able to collect the best example.  Perhaps it will have disappeared completely, despite momentary cultural prominence.  Perhaps--horrors!--children will have played with it and the best examples will still be dirty and torn and broken.  Perhaps you will have to pay more than you wanted to... Maybe someone else will get it before you. 

That seems to me a big issue here.  The V&A seems to be saying--better to spend now, collect everything and sort it out as history determines cultural path.  Then whatever you don't want, you can deaccession on Ebay. This strategy depends on money: having the money to get into the game at a certain level, the money to buy somewhat indiscriminately, the money to house/store these objects, the money to create a curatorial vision from the objects, the money to deaccession works when they don't fit that vision.  And clearly, collecting ephemera depends on having deep pockets.

Does that mean we shouldn't collect ephemera?  obviously, I think there's a value to seeing our culture through the eyes of what we created on a mundane level.  Should we wait, carefully following the trends of history and hoping to catch the right moment?  Is it better to collect widely or focusedly? I think as a historian I advocate focusing, trying to watch what's happening in the media to help understand the culture.  Knowing that we will never catch it all.  Hoping that as social history develops, we can catch ephemera before it disappears, rather than as it appears. 

Will these collections tell us as much in a hundred years as we imagine they will tell the space aliens who dig up our ruined civilization thousands of years from now?  Is this all a strategy of our human desire to stand in the water of culture, gathering up a small handful of what flows rapidly by?  Is it our human nature to want to gather in these objects because by extension, they are proof of our presence, of our importance?