Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Margot Norton, Helga Christoffersen, and Natalie Bell

What would Walter Benjamin do with our Storage Wars and Spark Joy moment? “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories,” he famously wrote. The things we choose to hold on to signal intimate and emotional links to history in an ever more virtual (and uprooted) world. At the heart of “The Keeper” is the power and preservation of such objects and images. The curators will transform the New Museum into a multimedia high-low Wunderkammer of the global twentieth-into-twenty-first century, with eccentric ethnographies and ritual archives—among them, one containing thousands of photos of people and their teddy bears—culled from artists, institutions, and intellectuals. If you missed the 2013 Venice Biennale, here’s the chance to see one of its great highlights—Roger Caillois’s mineral collection. And fear not, bibliophiles: There will be a catalogue to add to your home library.

— Prudence Peiffer