ABSTRACT
One of the marks of impending personal finitude being perhaps a keener sensitivity to the near infinitude of what remains to be done, counted, or accounted for. The chapter not only aims to mark any concatenation or sequential juxtaposition of objects or phenomena as most likely incomplete, but to foreground more specifically the deponency or dependency of things upon what is claimed to distinguish them or make them appear distinct: their "context." It outlines a different theory about the institution of the museum that attempts to respond to these challenges and which, in doing so, may also reconnect the authors’ ideas about museums with some very ancient but largely obscured theories about the relationships between art and religion. The chapter indicates where an effective and historically and critically responsible philosophy or theory of collecting and museums should be located—precisely at the intersection or juxtaposition between art and religion.
