David Joselit Professor at the City University of New York “David Joselit’s art-historical work has approached the history and theory of image circulation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a variety of perspectives, spanning Marcel Duchamp’s strategy of the readymade, in which commodities are reframed as artworks, to the mid-twentieth ecology of television, video art, and media activism, and the current conditions of contemporary art under dual pressures of globalization and digitization.” Has also worked as a curator. Writes to OCTOBER and Art Forum, etc.

After art What happens to images (art) in circulation, after the production phase? What should we do with the help of art works? Focuses on replication, remediation, dissemination in (digital) networks – not on individual pieces. Your assignments are nodes in this network! Images take many forms (paintings, prints, files…) and none of them are more real or important that others, alone.

Art (images) is a form of currency: it can be used for many purposes, it can easily be circulated, it has power to change things. Contact + current = currency (power). Aura of scarce objects has been replaced by buzz of saturation processes of currency such as flows of images (art). This happens elsewhere, too, not only in art. (Although Benjamin’s notions about aura, to my mind, do not simply show ”nostalgic despair” at the loss or aura. Getting rid of aura frees art from rituals and cults and lets us experiment, enjoy, participate etc. – which might be politically good.) Formats emerge from this buzz: how easily and widely things connect (to other images, money…) Cf. Bourdieus taste classes. Well, which formats are art formats and why, then? Searchability, scalability and connectivity count and critics must trace these. ”New York gets more hits than Bilbao.” (Bourdieu more than Joselit, Joselit more than me…) Work – citicen – community – institution – state – globe (cf. B’s more local communities).

Variations in art practices and attitudes – problematized by the present state?

At the end of the book, he refers to Hannah Arendt’s conception of power (without really analyzing it): ”Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.” Positive, harmonizing? Cf. the difference between, e.g., Mouffe and Habermas! Basically, art formations have power (connections) that can affect people’s attitudes and even transform them. But what quarantees that changes or transformations are… well, positive? For whom? Universities = transformation business. Art, too? What kind of role do image formations play in this? (Mixing of cultures etc.) What does it mean that art is a form of ”international currency”? Is he describing our present / contemporary situation in arts and other aesthetic phenomena correctly?

Gilmore and Pine: The Experience Economy