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JOHN PAUL STONARD, joselit, david. After Art. Princeton University Press, 2013, 136 pp., 1 b&w +39 color illus., $19.95 paper., The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 73, Issue 4, October 2015, Pages 477–479, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12225
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After art, David Joselit argues in this short, highly stimulating book, come images. Where “art” refers to tangible objects, created in a certain medium, “images” evokes disembodied “visual content,” unbound by any particular medium or format (p. xv). A painting is an archetypal work of art; a digital file of a photograph is an archetypal image. Images are best understood not by what they are but by what they do; and what they do best is circulate. As physical objects—the sixteenth‐century altarpiece, the framed painting in the museum's permanent collection—works of art are old‐fashioned; their power has been diminished in what Joselit terms a “digital and global era of wild image proliferation,” in which what counts is the frequency and velocity of reproduction (p. 98). It is the role of artists in this era not to clutter the world with more original art but rather to perform the more usefully task of putting images into the right kind of circulation.