David Joselit
Harvard University · Art History
Active 1986–2026
About
David Joselit is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and serves as the Chair for the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard. He began his career as a curator at The ICA in Boston from 1983 to 1989. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1995, he has taught at the University of California, Irvine, Yale University where he was Department Chair of History of Art from 2006 to 2009, and the CUNY Graduate Center. Joselit is an accomplished author, with publications including Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941, American Art Since 1945, Feedback: Television Against Democracy, After Art, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization, and Art’s Properties. His book Heritage and Debt was awarded the 2021 Robert Motherwell Book Award. He co-organized the exhibition “Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age,” which opened at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich in 2015. Joselit is also an editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Art
- Law
- Social Science
- Economics
- Aesthetics
- History
- Art history
- Computer Science
- Literature
- Anthropology
- Philosophy
- Epistemology
- Visual arts
- Linguistics
Selected publications
The MIT Press eBooks · 2026-04-21
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Nordic Journal of Aesthetics · 2024-08-23
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingHow is history transformed when human memory is externalized as data and stored on servers?For instance, if we Google the events of January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists, incited by Donald Trump's refusal to concede the 2020 presidential election, stormed the United States Capitol, in the hope of preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden's election, what results will we get?Will the results of a search made in Manhattan be identical to ones made in Houston, or Berlin?Will the web pages included on a list generated today be identical to those that appear tomorrow?And if so, will the emerging consensus on what happened on January 6 and what it meant (if there is, or could be one) be based on empirical evidence, or merely on the number of times that any link has been clicked?Elsewhere, I
Princeton University Press eBooks · 2023-01-13
bookOpen access1st authorCorrespondingA revisionist reading of modern art that examines how artworks are captured as property to legitimize power In 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 “captured,” 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 “elsewhere”—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. Dubois, 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.
Rocznik Ruskiej Bursy · 2023-12-15
articleOpen accessSenior authorNFTs, or The Readymade Reversed
October · 2021 · 30 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Aesthetics
- Art
Abstract Modern and contemporary art have redefined the relationship between information and matter. Whether in the readymade's scrambling of the categories of art and commodity or Conceptual art's translation of matter into information, the artwork is embedded in a dynamic multi-media discourse. The NFT, or non-fungible-token, reverses this long genealogy of contemporary art by hijacking the category of art as nothing more than a tool for designing a new asset class, ripe for exuberant speculation. In short, the readymade—whose purpose was to demonstrate the fungibility of artworks when shifted from one discursive category to another—has been reversed.
ARTMargins · 2021 · 3 citations
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Social Science
Abstract What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?
October · 2020 · 34 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Political Science
- History
In a brief excerpt from his book Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT, Spring 2020), David Joselit discusses how global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism.
An Appreciation of Douglas Crimp
October · 2020-03-01
article1st authorCorrespondingA brief remembrance of Douglas Crimp's political activism and its transformational effect on the author.
October · 2020-05-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingA wide-ranging conversation between artist Amy Sillman, Museum of Modern Art curator Michelle Kuo, and October editor David Joselit on Sillman's influential Artist's Choice exhibition, The Shape of Shape, presented in the reopening of MoMA's galleries in 2019. Topics range from the re-introduction of intuition into histories of contemporary painting to strategies for expanding the modernist canon.
A Questionnaire on Decolonization
October · 2020 · 31 citations
- Sociology
- Political Science
- History
The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum's structural relation to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its historical point of reference, the word's emphatic return is rhetorically powerful, and it corresponds to a parallel interest among scholars in a plural field of postcolonial or global modernisms. The exhortation to decolonize, however, is not uncontroversial-some believe it still carries a Eurocentric bias. Indeed, it has been proposed that, for the West, de-imperialization is perhaps even more urgent than decolonization. What does the term decolonize mean to you in your work in activism, criticism, art, and/or scholarship? Why has it come to play such an urgent role in the neoliberal West? How can we link it historically with the political history of decolonization, and how does it work to translate postcolonial theory into a critique of the neocolonial contemporary art world? Respondents include Nana Adusei-Poku, Brook Andrew, Sampada Aranke, Ian Bethell-Bennett, Kader Attia, Andrea Carlson, Elise Y. Chagas, ISUMA, Iftikhar Dadi, Janet Dees, Nitasha Dhillon, Hannah Feldman, Josh T. Franco, David Garneau, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Arnold J. Kemp, Thomas Lax, Nancy Luxon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Saloni Mathur, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Alan Michelson, Partha Mitter, Isabela Muci Barradas, Steven Nelson, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Alessandro Petti, Paulina Pineda, Christopher Pinney, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ryan Rice, Andrew Ross, Paul Chaat Smith, Nancy Spector, Francoise Verges, Rocio Zambrana, and Joseph R. Zordan.
Frequent coauthors
- 5 shared
Hal Foster
- 3 shared
Yve-Alain Bois
- 3 shared
Terry Smith
University of St Andrews
- 3 shared
Rosalind Krauss
- 2 shared
Alexander Mendiburu
- 2 shared
Elisabeth Sussman
- 2 shared
Yong Soon Min
- 2 shared
Eugene Wang
Awards & honors
- Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT, 2020) which wa…
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