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 ecology of television, video art, and media activism, and the current conditions of contemporary art under dual pressures of globalization and digitization.
Working as a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, during the 1980s, Joselit co-organized several exhibitions that helped to define the art of that decade, including Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (1986). He taught in the Department of Art History and Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies at University of California–Irvine from 1995 to 2003, and at Yale University from 2003 to 2013, where he served as Department Chair from 2006 to 2009.
Joselit’s art criticism has spanned all visual media and recently has engaged extensively with contemporary painting. He is author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941 (MIT Press, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, World of Art Series, 2003), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007), and After Art(Princeton University Press, 2012), and he is a contributing author to the second edition of Art Since 1900 (Thames and Hudson, 2011). He is an editor of the journal OCTOBER and a frequent contributor to Artforum.