On Miscellany

"We need all art as we need all nature."

Norbert Lynton

The first notion of miscellany as a cultural principle can be found in the early modern Wunderkammer—or cabinet of curiosities. Before miscellany became a residue of failed classification, it held a different kind of promise. The Wunderkammer was not simply a haphazard collection, as it is often portrayed in hindsight, but a sophisticated attempt to comprehend the richness of the world. These collections brought together natural specimens, artworks, artifacts, and oddities in arrangements shaped by Renaissance humanism, classical learning, and symbolic cosmology. Though lacking the taxonomic clarity demanded by later science, they reflected a genuine aspiration to unify knowledge across nature and culture. The Enlightenment would eventually dismiss such cabinets as unscientific, clearing the way for the disciplinary separation of knowledge and the hierarchical ordering of culture. What happened was that the Wunderkammer itself became synonymous with miscellany—with the term increasingly acquiring a negative connotation. Yet in today’s revaluation of the miscellaneous, one might sense a return—not to the form of the Wunderkammer, but to its spirit: a way of thinking that sees meaning in mixture, relation in diversity, and coherence not in purity, but in complexity.

Since the demise of the Wunderkammer, the term miscellaneous has come to function as a residual category primarily within cultural and museological contexts—those that strive to impose taxonomic order on the visual and material field. This impulse was formalized with the rise of the modern museum in the 18th and 19th centuries. Artworks were grouped by genre, geography, period, medium, or “school”—a classificatory logic inspired by the natural sciences and oriented toward clarity, progression, and didactic utility. Yet unlike the sciences, which tend to absorb anomalies through systematic revision, the arts retained a conceptual drawer for what did not fit: the miscellaneous.

Over time, this drawer grew heavy with practices, objects, and ideas that resisted easy classification. Folk traditions, hybrid forms, anonymous craft, non-Western artefacts, and experimental or interdisciplinary work were often relegated to the margins—not because they lacked value, but because they did not conform to the prevailing criteria of artistic legitimacy. While museums rarely used the label miscellaneous explicitly, whether applied directly or by implication, it did not simply denote variety; it indexed uncertainty, irregularity, and a failure to conform. It became, in effect, a conceptual dumping ground within the institution’s schema. To be called “miscellaneous” was to be suspended in a liminal state—present but unrecognized, included but unvalued.

Even when specialized museums were eventually established to host categories such as African art or Outsider art, they did so largely from within a canonical worldview—one that continued to treat such works as deviations from a presumed norm. Rather than dismantling the hierarchy, these institutions often reaffirmed it by isolating difference rather than integrating it. A few years ago, the Dutch government again reinforced this logic by introducing a "canon of the Netherlands," a selective historical narrative that explicitly prioritized certain events, figures, and artworks over others. Such campaigns reflect a tenacious tendency to enshrine cultural authority in exclusionary terms. The most chilling historical expression of this impulse was the Nazi regime’s Entartete Kunst exhibition of 1937, which sought to purge modernism from public life by branding it culturally degenerate—illustrating how the drive to define and defend a singular canon can serve authoritarian ends. Though less extreme, contemporary efforts to codify culture continue to sustain a system in which the miscellaneous remains a structural afterthought.

Yet alongside the ongoing politicization of the canon, a parallel revaluation of the term miscellaneous has gained momentum over the past decades. The critique of institutional hierarchies by artists, scholars, and curators—particularly through postcolonial and feminist frameworks—has destabilized the primacy of traditional categories. The miscellaneous is increasingly being reclaimed as a site of hybridity, resistance, and pluralism. Marginal arts—textile art, Indigenous practices, and diasporic visual languages—are not longer seen as footnotes to dominant histories, but as challenges to the very structures that once relegated them.

Thus, the history of the miscellaneous in art is not merely about classification; it is about power. It reveals how the systems that organize knowledge can obscure as much as they reveal. The canon, long dominant, offers a stable structure but at great cost: it slows culture’s circulation, narrows its scope, and leaves vast territories of knowledge and form underused. This condition, however, is ultimately unsustainable. There is a growing awareness that over-specialization in the arts mirrors the problems of monoculture in agriculture: a system optimized for efficiency and market value, but one that exhausts the soil and reduces biodiversity. In the cultural sphere, a canon driven by the power of market logic similarly depletes the field of meaning, sidelining practices that do not yield immediate institutional or commercial recognition. It privileges uniformity at the expense of resilience, and stability over renewal.

While critical perspectives from the margins have highlighted these imbalances, they have not yet succeeded in shifting the dominant narrative. To do so, the margin must begin to redefine the center. This imperative was already present in Norbert Lynton’s radical observation, offered at the close of The Story of Modern Art (1989): “We need all art as we need all nature.” In this sentence, Lynton advanced a vision of culture as a living system—reminding us that in a plural world, coherence does not come from reducing difference, but from learning how to live and think with it.

Lynton’s insight echoes that of Alexander von Humboldt, whose early 19th-century work laid the foundations for ecological thinking. Humboldt argued that nature should not be understood as a hierarchy of separate entities, but as a dynamic, interrelated system—one in which every element influences and sustains the others. This ecological vision later informed his approach to knowledge itself: not as a series of isolated disciplines, but as a similarly interconnected web of understanding. His holistic approach made it possible for modern scientists to understand the mechanisms behind ecological collapse and biodiversity loss—insights that continue to drive the global conservationist movement. In light of this, the art world too must begin to think ecologically: to recognize that its vitality depends not on purity or lineage, but on multiplicity, exchange, and coexistence.

The time has come, then, for miscellaneous thinking to assert its force. Because culture, like nature, must be allowed to thrive. The goal is simple and profound: to unleash the abundance of culture, in a way that adds to its life rather than merely drawing from it. To think miscellaneously is to move across categories, traditions, materials, and contexts; to see in every fragment the possibility of meaning, in every juxtaposition the spark of new life. And so, miscellaneous shifts back again from a residual category to the operative principle of a dynamic cultural system. As such, it becomes truer to its Latin root miscere, meaning 'to mix,' which underscores its active, integrative force in culture.

That Harmen Brethouwer refers to his work as a miscellany is therefore not a casual remark, but a declaration. Few artists frame their practice this way, precisely because diversity remains contested. To some, it still suggests distraction, or indecision, or lack of refinement. But Brethouwer sees it as a principle of cultural action—and he stands by it. The stakes are real: what is excluded from cultural visibility shapes not only the canon, but the collective imagination of what art—and by extension, humanity—can be.