David Joselit. After Art

David Joselit’s new book ‘After Art’ offers an analysis of our present as a moment of intensified interconnectivity and image-traffic. While informational, social and economic networks grow in size and density, images circulate through them and behave like a kind of currency. Joselit makes the case that artistic practice needs to change accordingly, and he suggests that this involves questioning a set of pieties that rule the production and criticism of art. Instead of clinging to concepts such as ‘the medium’ or ‘postmediality’, thinking of artworks as ‘objects’, and continuing to play the games of institutional critique, he argues that art should capitalize on its new power of projecting visibility to a heretofore unknown degree. Once works and images embrace this condition after art, Joselit suggests, they can travel fast and far, and have the potential for becoming sites for the emergence of new aesthetic, social and political circuits.
Introduced by Armen Avanessian, David Joselit will first read passages from ‘After Art’. He will then engage in a discussion with Isabelle Graw and Philipp Ekardt who will present him with a set of questions and criticism.
Participants:
David Joselit is Carnegie Professor of History of Modern Art and Culture at Yale University and an editor of OCTOBER magazine. He is also the author of 'Feedback: Television Against Democracy' (MIT Press 2007) and ‘Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941’ (MIT Press/OCTOBER Books 1998). He has edited special issues of OCTOBER on television and digital art.
Isabelle Graw is professor for the history and theory of art at the Hochschule für bildende Künste - Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. She is the publisher of Texte zur Kunst magazine, which she cofounded. Among her books is ‘High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture’ (Sternberg Press 2010). She is also one of the editors of and contributors to ‘Thinking through Painting. Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas’, which appeared in the ‘Institut für Kunstkritik’-series at Sternberg Press (2012).
Philipp Ekardt received his PhD from Yale University and is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Freie Universität Berlin. His writing on art, fashion, and literature has appeared in OCTOBER, Texte zur Kunst, and frieze d/e, among other venues. He is currently completing a monograph on the image-work of Alexander Kluge.
Armen Avanessian works at the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin and is a founder of the research platform on Speculative Poetics. Among his recent book-publications are: ‘Phänomenologie ironischen Geistes. Ethik, Poetik und Politik der Moderne’ (Fink, 2010), ‘Aesthetics and Contemporary Art’ (Sternberg, 2011, ed. together with Luke Skrebowski), ‘Präsens. Poetik eines Tempus’ (Diaphanes, 2012, together with Anke Hennig), and ‘Realismus Jetzt! Spekulative Philosophie und Metaphysik für das 21. Jahrhundert’ (Merve, 2013, ed.). He is also editor of the book series SPEKULATIONEN with MERVE and guest editor of the series ‘Theory for the 21st Century’ for SPIKE magazine.
* This event is organized in collaboration with the SFB 626 at Freie Universität Berlin and www.spekulative-poetik.de *