Bøker av David Joselit

A revisionist reading of modern art that examines how artworks are captured as property to legitimize powerIn this provocative new account, David Joselit shows how art from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries began to function as a commodity, while the qualities of the artist, nation, or period themselves became valuable properties. Joselit explores repatriation, explaining that this is not just a contemporary conflict between the Global South and Euro-American museums, noting that the Louvre, the first modern museum, was built on looted works and faced demands for restitution and repatriation early in its history. Joselit argues that the property values of white supremacy underlie the ideology of possessive individualism animating modern art, and he considers issues of identity and proprietary authorship.Joselit redefines art's politics, arguing that these pertain not to an artwork's content or form but to the way it is "e;captured,"e; made to represent powerful interests-whether a nation, a government, or a celebrity artist collected by oligarchs. Artworks themselves are not political but occupy at once the here and now and an "e;elsewhere"e;-an alterity-that can't ever be fully appropriated. The history of modern art, Joselit asserts, is the history of transforming this alterity into private property.Narrating scenes from the emergence and capture of modern art-touching on a range of topics that include the Byzantine church, French copyright law, the 1900 Paris Exposition, W.E.B. Du Bois, the conceptual artist Adrian Piper, and the controversy over Dana Schutz's painting Open Casket-Joselit argues that the meaning of art is its infinite capacity to generate experience over time.

Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the most interesting contemporary work in both fields is now based on visualizing patterns of dissemination after objects and structures are produced, and after they enter into, and even establish, diverse networks. Behaving like human search engines, artists and architects sort, capture, and reformat existing content. Works of art crystallize out of populations of images, and buildings emerge out of the dynamics of the circulation patterns they will house. Examining the work of architectural firms such as OMA, Reiser + Umemoto, and Foreign Office, as well as the art of Matthew Barney, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, and many others, After Art provides a compelling and original theory of art and architecture in the age of global networks.