The artists and collectors discussed today, through the methodology of collecting and/or a critique of museological practice, contribute in various ways and different degrees, to an undertaking of enormous scope—the reclassification of material culture. A number of collections-as-art by such artists as Claes Oldenburg, Gerhard Richter, and Donald Lipski arose from the necessary gathering of source material.

Claes Oldenburg's Mouse Museum (1972) is a collection of 389 artifacts from popular culture, including objects altered by Oldenburg, and objects made by him that are housed in an Oldenburg-designed structure in the shape of a geometric mouse.