A 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. 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.
