As a scholar and a critic David Joselit has worked on pivotal moments in modern art ranging from the Dada movement of the early 20th century to the emergence of globalization and new media over the past decade. His latest book, After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012) defines a shift in the status of art under dual pressures of digital technology—through which images may be reformatted and disseminated instantly and effortlessly—and a globalized art world that functions like a cross between the film industry and higher education. It continues the arguments made in Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007), which addresses television as a closed circuit that video artists and media activists have broken into in a variety of ways since the 1960s. Joselit's first book, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (October Books; MIT Press, 1998), positions Duchamp’s art at the intersection of a waning industrial world and the emergence of consumer culture in the late teens and twenties. American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, 2003) is a synthetic survey that grows in part out of Joselit’s years as a curator at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston during the 1980s, and his longstanding practice as a critic for such publications as Artforum and Art in America. He is currently an editor of OCTOBER. In addition to his main areas of research Joselit has a strong interest in gender, queer, and feminist studies.

Selected Publications
“Painting Beside Itself,” OCTOBER 130 (Fall 2009), 125-134

“No Exit: Video and the Readymade,” OCTOBER 119 (Winter 2007), pp. 37-45.

“The Artist Readymade: Marcel Duchamp and the Société Anonyme,” in Jennifer Gross, ed, The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006): 33-43.

“Dada’s Diagrams,” in Leah Dickerman, ed, with Matthew S. Witkovsky, The Dada Seminars (Washington: The National Gallery of Art; New York: D.A.P., 2005): 221-239.

“Molds and Swarms,” in Helen Molesworth, ed., Part Object Part Sculpture (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts and The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005): 156-165.

“Navigating the New Territory: Art, Avatars, and the Contemporary Mediascape,” Artforum, v. 43, n. 10 (Summer 2005): 276-279.

“Notes on Surface: toward a genealogy of flatness,” Art History, volume 23, number 1 (March 2000): 19-34.

View PDF of CV