From its conception, The New Museum has played a unique role within the art community. Temporarily Possessed relates the Museum's exhibition history and collecting practices to the interests of the larger global art community. A detailed timeline charts international art events and major exhibitions and collecting precedents. Excerpts from critical reviews and essays, as well as supporting statements from artists, collectors and curators, including Louise Lawler, Saul Dennison and William Olander, offer a challenging appraisal of the last two decades. "In light of today's heated disputes over deaccessioning, the decision to build planning obsolescence into The New Museum's collecting policy can be seen as either a terrible precedent or a prescient move. But it was a decision specifically born of our desire to match our exhibition and collections practices to each other, to the kinds of work artists were doing at that time, and to what they might be doing in the future...Our collection is by its very nature a strange hybrid, an organic rather than a constructed or heavily-edited amalgam of the rapidly changing attitudes, ideas, and economics of the past twenty years." -Marcia Tucker, "A Reflection on the Collection," pp.7-8.