Collecting practice and institutional legacy of Lillie P. Bliss (1864-1931)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to advance the study of the history of collecting through the reassessment of an underestimated exemplar in the fields of culture and philanthropy. The examination of Bliss's motivation, methods, and impact undertaken here endeavours to correct two oversights: that Bliss has not been given due recognition as a major collector of modern art and that Bliss has not been adequately credited as a force in the history of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The subject’s collecting career is reconstructed, and MoMA’s foundational narrative revisited, through archival material related to the art and the artists that Bliss collected and patronised; the art market in which she operated; and the evolution of the New York museum ecosystem – all contextualised in the social, political and economic upheaval that defined the first half of the twentieth century. The chronological structure of the thesis tracks the objects composing the Bliss collection through time – from acquisition to institutionalisation to deaccessioning – discovering fluctuations in their value, both real and perceived. Bliss is shown to be a market actor of consequence, whose dealer relationships evolved from mentor-mentee to the purely transactional, reflecting her own transformation from amateur to professional. Bliss – and later the Bliss collection – are shown to have played an inestimable role in building, stabilising and shaping MoMA as a significant institution and an authoritative voice in its first quarter century. Along with these conclusions, the thesis contributes to development of a unified methodology by blending the traditional anecdotal case study approach to collectors, with concepts drawn from the study of museums and canon formation, and the more data driven approach to the study of markets.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".