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 century ecology of television, video art, and media activism, and the current conditions of contemporary art under dual pressures of globalization and digitization.

Departing from his most recent publication After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012), Joselit will further consider the nature of contemporary art as an agent within globalized networks, in a lecture titled Heritage and Debt. In this talk, he will propose a deep structure of globalization, acknowledging that not every artist from everywhere is “global” but rather that globality implies an international style, which both appropriates and represses indigenous modes of creativity. It is from this dual action of appropriation and repression that the title Heritage and Debt is drawn. Art manifests the ratio between that which is inherited from a culture and that which it owes to others; it is a laboratory for inventing global subjects and objects.

David Joselit is a distinguished professor in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center. His publications include Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007), and Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (October Books; MIT Press, 1998). He is an editor of the journal October and a regular contributor to art periodicals such as Artforum and Texte zur Kunst.

Co-presented by Midway Contemporary Art, Univocal Publishing, and the Walker Art Center.