David Joselit's After Artis devoted to analyzing scale and speed at which proliferate today as well as ways in which these trajectories have been taken up in recent artistic practice. In midst of a discussion of work of Pierre Huyghe, an artist who has dealt extensively with issues of intellectual property, a footnote with an at best tenuous relationship to body of text rather perplexingly deems a discussion of copyright beyond scope of book.1 As that body of laws that serves to regulate scale and speed at which may legally proliferate, one might assume that considerations of copyright would play a significant role in Joselit's text. But it is this exclusion that allows Joselit to set up what is perhaps book's grounding opposition, between what he terms the free 'neoliberal' circulation of images and a fundamentalist attitude that posits that art and architecture are rooted to a specific place.* There is no question as to where Joselit locates his own allegiances in this conflict: for him, neoliberal circulation proposes exciting new forms of connectivity, while fundamentalists cling to rather unfortunate privileging of discrete objects and fail to recognize that contemporary existence is characterized above all by ecstatic mobility. Despite centrality of logic of privatization to economic philosophy of neoliberalism, privatization of visual culture through aggressive enforcement of copyright nowhere enters into Joselit's application of this term to realm of images.Copyright's absence here takes on a strategic importance, as it allows Joselit to map an opposition of present/past onto that of neoliberal movement/fundamentalist stasis and make an epochal claim for ours as a time of unfettered transmission and networked relationality. A consideration of copyright law, and particularly extent to which it has rigidified over last twenty years, would temper apparent freedoms of neoliberal circulation thatjoselit values by introducing a discussion of a pervasive form of control irreducible to fundamentalism he can so easily dismiss as oldfashioned. During this period, aggressive legislation and prosecution, copyright enforcement robots, and digital rights management systems have transformed a set of laws originally formulated to stimulate creativity into a framework for profit-motivated policing. In particular, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, passed by a unanimous vote in U.S. Senate, heralded a new era of extremism.3 But for Joselit, an assessment of realities of copyright in post-DMCA context would reveal its ability to render sclerotic connective circuits he holds so dear.Such an affirmation of unbridled circulation is exemplary of a pervasive tendency among artists and critics engaging with contemporary mobility of images, though it is seldom expressed as explicitly as it is in After Art. It is a tendency that cuts across a wide variety of aesthetic and political investments to celebrate promiscuous circulation as sine qua non of contemporary visual culture, often implicidy replaying long-standing but spurious association of digital technology with freedom, democracy, and user autonomy. However, just as it is necessary to recognize Internet as a technology of both freedom and control, so too is it imperative that contemporary circulation of is understood as both more unmoored and more restrained than ever before. In 1994 John Perry Barlow, founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote that Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain digitized expression any more than real estate law might be revised to cover allocation of broadcasting spectrum-and yet this is exactly what has occurred.4 Though such revisions are certainly not watertight, they cannot be ignored. Moreover, this development is not particularly surprising; after all, history of copyright legislation is nothing other than history of grappling with technological innovations that challenge it. …
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Jan 1, 2018
Kaylee Harmon 
Open Access
