Art museums and public galleries amass collections in order to preserve, document, research and exhibit collective histories as a culture. Edited by Anthony Kiendl, Obsession, Compulsion, Collection is a compilation of essays by leading Canadian and International curators and artists who explore collecting as a cultural act. Examining the meaning of art objects in a broader context, the book seeks to uncover the human impulse to collect and the social context, rhetoric, politics and science associated with cultural collections.

Anthony Kiendl is a Canadian curator of Contemporary Art. His curatorial practice has theorized weakness, pathos, failure - and related sentiments such as nostalgia - as responses to modernism. This strategy has been manifested in diverse forms including exhibitions such as Little Worlds (1998), an exploration of diminutive environments by artists; Space Camp 2000: Uncertainty, Speculative Fictions and Art (2000), a inter-disciplinary cocktail of speculative fictions and alterity; and Godzilla vs. Skateboarders: Skateboarding as a Critique of Social Spaces (2001) all at Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina. Kiendl 's writing has been included in multiple publications such as Parachute, FUSE, Flash Art, and numerous catalogue essays. In 2007 he was Leverhulme Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Arts, Middlesex University, London; and in 2009 while Director of Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, he was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.

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