#david joselit

[dare-g]

First 10 books of the year 📖

[dare-g]

"In informational economies of overproduction, value is derived not merely from the intrinsic qualities of a commodity (or other object), but from its searchability—its susceptibility to being found, or recognized (or profiled). This explains why contemporary art marginalizes the production of content in favor of producing new formats for existing images, and it accounts for the strategies of a wide range of architects who generate space through the analysis and formation, or shaping, of data. These manipulations are the aesthetic analogue to Google’s algorithms. Like such algorithms, art and architecture reformat existing streams of images and information. They practice both an epistemology and an aesthetics of the search engine."

After Art

[altcomics]

"I was thinking about these containers of recollections, where somebody can access a period of time and experience it from all these different perspectives. If time can be recorded in such an expansive way, then the future and the past will completely merge into one sprawling form. Both will be as set in stone as they are malleable, because if you can navigate something that already happened and alter it and create versions of it, how's that any different from a new event, whatever that might mean?"

Ryan Trecartin

"In other words, rather than the artwork’s being defined by its position within a historical discourse, it generates its own ahistorical universe of references. From this perspective, each artwork is a machine for producing narratives rather than a historical artifact, an archive rather than a document."

David Joselit

[jacobwren]

The modern practice of art, they argue, epitomizes possessive individualism, and pace the many romantic art-historical accounts that find the history of modernism and contemporary art replete with heroic critiques of capitalism, the figure of the artist, in the curators’ view, is the very archetype of liberalism (or neoliberalism) owing to its close association with independence—or, in avant-garde terms, its autonomy. Franke and Stakemeier have therefore placed themselves in something of a double bind, since they want to see the world of art as a repressive infrastructure for enclosing artistic labor as property, while as curators they implicitly celebrate, or at least consent to publicizing, the art world’s cultural legitimacy. This double bind leads to some rather convoluted prose in various contributions to their ambitious catalogue, but however inelegant the language used to explore it, the problem is a real and very pressing one. Its clearest statement is in the curators’ introduction to a useful and comprehensive free brochure available to exhibitiongoers: “The practices that are here being placed in relation with one another materialize the illiberalism at the core of modern liberality as a series of ruptures of modern property forms.” In other words, if we cut through the jargon, what unites the twenty-seven artists and groups included in “Illiberal Arts” is that they each explore, in quite distinct ways, how to make art while avoiding wielding one’s own identity—or anyone else’s—as property. Some critics have argued that we are currently experiencing a return to identity politics, but “Illiberal Arts” demonstrates how urgently we need to rethink how claiming an identity slips almost imperceptibly into a form of exclusive property in oneself. The politics of this moment—rife with nativism on both the Right and the Left—calls for the collapse of modes of self-possession that fuel identity politics. It calls for a kind of abolition of property in oneself through a set of aesthetic strategies identified in the exhibition.

David Joselit on “Illiberal Arts”

[perfect-readers]

It bears repeating: Duchamp used the category of art to liberate materiality from commodifiable form; the NFT deploys the category of art to extract private property from freely available information.

Of course, the readymade came relatively early in Duchamp’s career. His final work, Étant donnés (1946–66), modeled a wholly different articulation between spectatorship and materiality. Unlike the mediagenic readymades, Étant donnés resists reproduction absolutely. It is impossible to pretend to know it without seeing it in person in Philadelphia. And when one does, one must press one’s face against a sweat-stained door and strain to see what’s going on through nasty peepholes. To see this artwork, one must literally set one’s body against it, making its materiality inescapable. There is consequently no fungibility here either, but rather than enabling financial speculation, this non-fungibility guarantees a face-to-face encounter with absolute singularity.

The relation between matter and property is political. Art can function as a technology of extraction, or it can, as Duchamp’s work did, destabilize the moment of matter’s becoming-property in ways that are historically specific and aesthetically engrossing. Such destabilization may address a variety of pressing questions including the legacy of slavery (the human becoming property), economic injustice (labor becoming property), and the persistence of colonial relations in the museum (race becoming property). But what are the aesthetics of such incomplete, or traumatic, or sensual, or enraged passages of matter into property and property into matter? Obviously, there can be no single answer to this question. I am convinced, however, that such an aesthetics must be founded on spectatorial generosity, in which one meets the gift of the artist’s work with the gift of one’s time. If our acts of looking refuse to be possessive—if they are aimed not at defining an object but rather at exploring it as a material territory of inexhaustible event—then appropriation will be impossible. After all, Everydays can only be considered non-fungible because enough people agreed that it is. On the contrary, in their previous life, all of this work’s constituent images functioned online as a mode of communication. The NFT is a social contract that values property over material experience. That contract can be broken.

— David Joselit, “NFTs, or The Readymade Reversed,” October No. 175 (Winter 2021)

[i-luv-tigers]

David Joselit - After Art - Formats

Characterizing a change from medium —> formats

Medium: material substrate (paint and canvas) + aesthetic tradition (the history of painting)

Formats: connections, fields, links, connections

“what now matters mostis not the productin of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting.” - Epistemology of the Search

Rem Koolhaas - Content “junkspace” in which disparate signs, fields, are mashed up side by side in feeds, blogs, etc.,

Task is to give junkspace, in general, which can only be understood as a kind of jarring relationship, a “shape” or a “form”

Alejandro Zaera-Polo - the politics of the envelope

Google gave the WWW a “shape” even if it was an imperfect one

reiterating previous - “contemporary art marginalizes the production of content in favor of producing new formats for existing images” - Aesthetics of the Search Engine

Critics task is to trace out “links” between nodes and connections. Joselit gives four categories: Work [OF ART] to Citizen, Community to Institution, Institution to State, and State to Globe

Work of Art to Citizen

two previous categories of connection:

first, perceptual connection, in which optical sensation corresponds with a kind of knowing

second, the psychological connection which refers to how works of art create dynamics of identification (modernism, abstraction, beyond)

Joselit’s task is to interrogate these connections as a form of nonmonetary exchange—rather, cultural exchange, or exchange of another kind of value.

Refers to Tania Brugera’s work Generic Capitalism, a panel discussion between Wunderground’s Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, which Brugera staged and then planted audience members to antagonize the panelists in two different ways—one accusing them of extremism, the other accusing them of moderation.

Bruguera’s piece does not collapse art and life by introducing political representation, rather, it creates an authentically political event and then disrupts the connections implicit therein in two ways: first, she challenges the assumed political homogeny of the audience/speakers. second, she challenges the assumption that the piece will not be subject to the artist/trickster’s hand. “In other words, Bruguera’s work explores the nature of social ties or associations; in essence, it explores the web of connections that constitutes her format.”

Refers to Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, rereads Generic Capitalism as a two-step process: first, she stages an event, and then organizes its transgression. (Other artists that Joselit places in this category include Santiago Sieera, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, Tino Sehgal.) Additionally, Joselit argues that the title Generic Capitalism is apt as a larger category for the Work of Art - Citizen relationship—“interpersonal transactions premised on trust and aimed at producing value through collective knowledge”—the art of the deal.

Community to Institution

Thomas Hoving became the leader of MOMA NY in 1967, promised to make the museum more democratic, however his first exhibition featured only the gilded objects from monarchies that the museum had acquired. Joselit links this to a kind of “royalist populism” in which the accumulation and presentation and celebration of wealth is equated with the “common good” (common wealth itself being a kind of paradox).

Compares the museum to a bank that is engaged in a money-laundering operation—finance capital is converted into cultural capital and then presented as a kind of “public good.” Museums justify extreme concetration of capital as “for the public good;” the museum makes wealth fascinating and legitimate. Thus, income inequality and the flourishing of arts institutions are catastrophically linked.

Institution to State

In critiquing the process of “branding the museum,” Joselit proposes a spectrum between two Platonic ideals—on one end the absolutely hermetic (read as: totally esoteric, distinct, occult, etc) image which isn’t connected to anything, and on the other end, the absolutely accessible image, which has an infinite capacity to reach audiences.

Buildings act as “three-dimensional logos” — Guggenheim, Getty, Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI Museum, Rem Koolhaa’s CCV all create knots in which the visitor moves in and out of the “eye” of the building

“Guggenheim Bilbao assumes a format (logo/architecture) that leads from a diverse rray of art objects to a single branded image whose purpose is to attract capital” - no wonder they look like black holes

State to Globe

Premise that “scale matters” (referencing Rem Koolhaas + Bruce Mau - S,M,L,XL)

Cookies, hits, search engine optimization

Paradox - we thought global economics + globalized communications technologies would decentralize, but in reality, financial/cultural capitals profit from their density—they get more hits

Art is an international currency - Donald Rubell

With globalization comes a paradoxical localization, or at least nationalization — non-western artists are required to imbue their work with a certain degree of “otherness” in order to be absorbed into the Global Art Market - refers to Subodh Gupta’s insertion of native Indian utensils into his giant skull in high contrast with Hirst’s diamonds

Colonization through architecture — Gehry, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas — also grants artistic “legitimacy”

James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II - introduce a hierarchy of economies:

Commoditi es are extracted from the earth

Goods are manufactured from commodities

Service are intangible activities on behalf of customers

Experiences are memorable events that engage in a personal way

Transformations are effectual outcomes that guide customers to change themselves

With each scale upwards, there is a higher degree of variability, granularity, customization

Art gets bound up with national sovereignty — Italy, Greece, Egypt, Peru demand return of their cultural artifacts where for China, contemporary art is a means of soft diplomacy

Art establishes a currency exchange where cultural difference is monetized and exchanged—but not totally monetized, however, and “images can act as infiltrators, spies, trojan horses”—thus, the work of art has a new kind of power under the “epistemology of the search”

David Joselit - After Art - Power

Revolving door between academia and politics - Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, etc.,

Commonality between museums and academic institutions — enormous wealth + vast amounts of knowledge

Museums purport to democratize — returning the private accumulation of the ultra rich back to the people in the form of cultural capital

Early-to-mid 20th century modernism as the “era of art” in which art is a vessel for secular knowledge, Joselit makes the case that we have surpassed this “era of art” into the newer “epistemology of the search”

Comparing structures between the museum structure, the art world in general, academia in general, and the film industry - capital, networks of distributions, internal hierarchies, privileged communities, mobilization towards economic / nationalist ends

Obsolescence of the function of art as “alternate realities”; we live in a plurality of alternate realities

The art world links cultural capital with financial power — it holds this power uniquely, more than universities and the film industry (I disagree, I just think we should look harder but)

In the history of institutional critique, there’s a general assumption that the power of art is necessarily evil — Hans Haacke, ®™ark, RepoHistory, Yes Men, subRosa, Raqs, Electronic Disturbance Theater, etc.— all operate under this assumption.

Regards Ai Wei Wei as an instance of using art-power positively, or rather the platform afforded to him by art’s power — he exploits the power of images

Ref. Hannah Arendt On Violence - power emerges from groups, or, for Joselit, from connectivity.

concludes, that one doesn’t need to exit the art world or even critique it, instead, we muse creatively exploit its potential power, which is kind of latent until it is mobilized towards a goal

[altcomics]

Branding is not a style but rather an operation which includes both an initial gambit for capturing attention and a long-term, always precarious effort to maintain “customer loyalty.

David Joselit

[pxssagat]

.. remaining outside of representation…

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