“Art’s Properties”

David Joselit
“Art’s Properties”
[Response: Irene V. Small]
Tuesday, October 31, 2023 @5pm ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Art’s Properties is a revisionist reading of modern art in response to recent calls for racial justice. It assesses modern Euro-American art, from the late 18th century to the present, in light of systemic racism or white supremacy. As such, it addresses questions of repatriation, the history of museums and copyright, black radical theory, and contemporary art criticism to explore the ethics of claiming aesthetic content as one’s own exclusive property.

David Joselit is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor and Chair of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard. He is author several books including Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT Press 2020) which won the Robert Motherwell Book award in 2021 and Art’s Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Irene V. Small is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art & Criticism in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, and associated faculty in the Program in Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She is the author of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (University of Chicago Press, 2016). A new book, The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism, is forthcoming from Zone Books in 2024.