Too much ink has been spilled on Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)—but still not... more Too much ink has been spilled on Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)—but still not enough on the contents of the bar.1 It is crowded with bottles—bottles in many ways far more distinctive than the blur of patrons reflected in the painting’s paradoxical mirror. To the left on the bar, a half-dozen are crowded together: a clear glass bottle filled with reddish fluid, a brown glass bottle whose red-triangle label identifies it as Bass Ale, and a cluster of four dark-glass gold-foiled bottles of Champagne. One example of each of these bottle types is strategically reflected in the mirror, just to the left of the barmaid’s black-clad right elbow. Exhibited at the 1882 Salon, the official annual exhibition of the French Academy of Fine Arts, Manet’s Bar pressed labeled bottles and nascent intel- lectual property law into the highest echelons of official art. Read from left to right, the bottle labels instantiate—represent is too weak a word—the artist’s signature (“Manet 1882”), the world’s “first” registered trademark (Bass’s red triangle), and the trade dress of the archetypal product protected as a geographic indication (Champagne). Three marks of authenticity so distinct that they remain immediately distinguishable to this day. Manet painted and signed his last great work against the backdrop of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, the first international treaty for the protection of intellectual property, including patents, trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications. Debated and ratified in Paris from 1878 to 1883, it is still in force and, with nearly 180 contracting member countries, is one of the most widely adopted treaties worldwide. Manet’s judiciously chosen and distinctly rendered labels depict three types of intellectual property—artistic signatures, geographic indications, and trademarks—that would come to structure not only art’s position in global trade but also the contours of global trade itself. These labels and their watershed significance have been hiding in plain sight for over 150 years, as their decipherment necessitates hitherto distinct bodies of knowledge: the history of art and the history of intellectual property law. This article marshals both in an effort to retell the twinned births of international intellectual property law and modern art in early 1880s Paris.
Introduction to a special issue of Grey Room on "Art Beyond Copyright."
We conceived of this issu... more Introduction to a special issue of Grey Room on "Art Beyond Copyright." We conceived of this issue, “Art beyond Copyright,” nearly two years ago. Our position was and remains, first, that copyright law stands in direct opposition to art historians and is irrelevant to the vast multitude of practicing artists; and, second, that the myopic focus on copyright has blinded attention to conceptually and his- torically distinct facets of the law that inflect art practice, art history, and art law. The inadequacy of copyright and the imperative to seek out alternatives for art and law are the focus of this special issue of Grey Room.
Pablo Picasso’s Landscape with Billboards (1912) evinces a deep and complex relationship with eme... more Pablo Picasso’s Landscape with Billboards (1912) evinces a deep and complex relationship with emergent trademark and related intellectual property law in France. Among the three trademarked logos featured prominently in the work is that for Bouillon Kub. Critics, caricaturists, and the Cubists themselves toyed with the visual and textual rhymes between Cubism and Bouillon Kub. But only Picasso in his Landscape with Billboards engaged deeply with the nascent trademark and design protection laws exploited more forcefully by Bouillon Kub than nearly any other brand. This essay is a small part of a larger chapter on Picasso, Cubism, and the semiotics of trademark, which, in turn, is a part of the book project Art™: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks.
The current screen age unfolds beneath the banner of convergence: diverse media and art converge ... more The current screen age unfolds beneath the banner of convergence: diverse media and art converge in digital code and are displayed interchangeably on universal devices and screens. A century ago, the first screen age advanced under the sign of dispersion: screens dispersed into nearly every conceivable form of art. Buildings dematerialized into illuminated surfaces; abstract films and cameraless photographs filled avant-garde cinemas and journals; scrims populated stages; multimedia installations suffused trade shows and museum galleries; and, as we will see, modernist canvases (Fläche), commercial movie screens (Filmleinwand), and phantasmagoric scrims (Schirm) waged battle over material and symbolic supremacy. No one grasped the potentials and limitations of the first screen age more acutely than the avant-garde polymath and Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy.
There are more than enough intersections between controlled darkness and race, especially in cont... more There are more than enough intersections between controlled darkness and race, especially in contemporary art, to tell the history of artificial darkness—and the forms of darkness that precede, follow, and persist alongside it—with race at its troubled center. The short history that follows unfolds in three acts. First, I will briefly interrogate the dark side of enlightenment as ideology and technology, particularly how they interlink violently in eighteenth-century United States. Second, I will revisit the myths that undergird the rise of artificial darkness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, I will sketch several trajectories of technological and cultural darkness in the art of our times through the works of Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Hito Steyerl, and others. In short, we will traverse darkness as a chaotic force to be contained, as a technology to be controlled, and as a relic to be preserved and interrogated.
On the Town: A Performa Compendium 2016-2021, 2022
An extended review and discussion of Kia LaBeija's Untitled (The Black Act) in relation to Oskar ... more An extended review and discussion of Kia LaBeija's Untitled (The Black Act) in relation to Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet, artificial darkness, and race.
An extended discussion of the work of Walead Beshty in relation to materialist, ethical, legal, g... more An extended discussion of the work of Walead Beshty in relation to materialist, ethical, legal, governmental, architectural, and corporate transparency, in particular the ideological drift of transparency from the early 20th century to the present.
On a new body of large-scale camera obscura photographs by Vera Lutter made during a residency at... more On a new body of large-scale camera obscura photographs by Vera Lutter made during a residency at LACMA. In this body of work, Lutter documents the grounds, architecture, galleries, and individual works of the "old" LACMA before it was torn down.
On Jean Epstein's theory and practice of time manipulation in cinema, esp. in Le Tempestaire and ... more On Jean Epstein's theory and practice of time manipulation in cinema, esp. in Le Tempestaire and The Intelligence of a Machine.
Taking cues from architecture, painting, and experimental cinema, Noam Elcott maps three distinct... more Taking cues from architecture, painting, and experimental cinema, Noam Elcott maps three distinct paradigms for the format of the vertically oriented screen (i.e. portrait format). Portraiture-the erect human figure or face-may be understood as the eponymous and paradigmatic form of this vertical format. Vertical screens also align with the celluloid strips that run vertically through nearly all projectors, whose properties were interrogated by postwar avant-gardes and have taken on renewed urgency in light of celluloid's impending obsolescence. Finally, the luminous verticality of stained glass windows helped define the Gothic order, which provided a model for avant-garde experiments in light and space for a century or more, and which have suddenly returned to centre stage in contemporary art. Elcott's three distinct paradigms map a centuries-long encounter with vertical screens that resonate unexpectedly yet unambiguously in the present.
On new, large scale photographs by Anthony McCall.
Elcott, Noam M. "Smoke Screen." Aperture, no... more On new, large scale photographs by Anthony McCall.
Elcott, Noam M. "Smoke Screen." Aperture, no. 231 (2018): 72-77.
At their most basic, the cinematic imaginary and the photographic fact help explain how specific ... more At their most basic, the cinematic imaginary and the photographic fact help explain how specific techniques or even individual artworks could be viewed as quintessentially cinematic in the interwar period and archetypally photographic after the War. The interwar and post-WWII avant- gardes were possessed by media whose direct products were virtually absent. In the 1920s, avant-garde films were rarities even as the avant-garde cinematic imaginary reigned supreme. The 1960s and ’70s avant-gardes marshaled photography everywhere and produced photographs (as such) nowhere.
Elcott, Noam M. "The Cinematic Imaginary and the Photographic Fact: Media as Models for 20th Century Art." PhotoResearcher, no. 29 (2018): 7-23.
Too much ink has been spilled on Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)—but still not... more Too much ink has been spilled on Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)—but still not enough on the contents of the bar.1 It is crowded with bottles—bottles in many ways far more distinctive than the blur of patrons reflected in the painting’s paradoxical mirror. To the left on the bar, a half-dozen are crowded together: a clear glass bottle filled with reddish fluid, a brown glass bottle whose red-triangle label identifies it as Bass Ale, and a cluster of four dark-glass gold-foiled bottles of Champagne. One example of each of these bottle types is strategically reflected in the mirror, just to the left of the barmaid’s black-clad right elbow. Exhibited at the 1882 Salon, the official annual exhibition of the French Academy of Fine Arts, Manet’s Bar pressed labeled bottles and nascent intel- lectual property law into the highest echelons of official art. Read from left to right, the bottle labels instantiate—represent is too weak a word—the artist’s signature (“Manet 1882”), the world’s “first” registered trademark (Bass’s red triangle), and the trade dress of the archetypal product protected as a geographic indication (Champagne). Three marks of authenticity so distinct that they remain immediately distinguishable to this day. Manet painted and signed his last great work against the backdrop of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, the first international treaty for the protection of intellectual property, including patents, trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications. Debated and ratified in Paris from 1878 to 1883, it is still in force and, with nearly 180 contracting member countries, is one of the most widely adopted treaties worldwide. Manet’s judiciously chosen and distinctly rendered labels depict three types of intellectual property—artistic signatures, geographic indications, and trademarks—that would come to structure not only art’s position in global trade but also the contours of global trade itself. These labels and their watershed significance have been hiding in plain sight for over 150 years, as their decipherment necessitates hitherto distinct bodies of knowledge: the history of art and the history of intellectual property law. This article marshals both in an effort to retell the twinned births of international intellectual property law and modern art in early 1880s Paris.
Introduction to a special issue of Grey Room on "Art Beyond Copyright."
We conceived of this issu... more Introduction to a special issue of Grey Room on "Art Beyond Copyright." We conceived of this issue, “Art beyond Copyright,” nearly two years ago. Our position was and remains, first, that copyright law stands in direct opposition to art historians and is irrelevant to the vast multitude of practicing artists; and, second, that the myopic focus on copyright has blinded attention to conceptually and his- torically distinct facets of the law that inflect art practice, art history, and art law. The inadequacy of copyright and the imperative to seek out alternatives for art and law are the focus of this special issue of Grey Room.
Pablo Picasso’s Landscape with Billboards (1912) evinces a deep and complex relationship with eme... more Pablo Picasso’s Landscape with Billboards (1912) evinces a deep and complex relationship with emergent trademark and related intellectual property law in France. Among the three trademarked logos featured prominently in the work is that for Bouillon Kub. Critics, caricaturists, and the Cubists themselves toyed with the visual and textual rhymes between Cubism and Bouillon Kub. But only Picasso in his Landscape with Billboards engaged deeply with the nascent trademark and design protection laws exploited more forcefully by Bouillon Kub than nearly any other brand. This essay is a small part of a larger chapter on Picasso, Cubism, and the semiotics of trademark, which, in turn, is a part of the book project Art™: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks.
The current screen age unfolds beneath the banner of convergence: diverse media and art converge ... more The current screen age unfolds beneath the banner of convergence: diverse media and art converge in digital code and are displayed interchangeably on universal devices and screens. A century ago, the first screen age advanced under the sign of dispersion: screens dispersed into nearly every conceivable form of art. Buildings dematerialized into illuminated surfaces; abstract films and cameraless photographs filled avant-garde cinemas and journals; scrims populated stages; multimedia installations suffused trade shows and museum galleries; and, as we will see, modernist canvases (Fläche), commercial movie screens (Filmleinwand), and phantasmagoric scrims (Schirm) waged battle over material and symbolic supremacy. No one grasped the potentials and limitations of the first screen age more acutely than the avant-garde polymath and Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy.
There are more than enough intersections between controlled darkness and race, especially in cont... more There are more than enough intersections between controlled darkness and race, especially in contemporary art, to tell the history of artificial darkness—and the forms of darkness that precede, follow, and persist alongside it—with race at its troubled center. The short history that follows unfolds in three acts. First, I will briefly interrogate the dark side of enlightenment as ideology and technology, particularly how they interlink violently in eighteenth-century United States. Second, I will revisit the myths that undergird the rise of artificial darkness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, I will sketch several trajectories of technological and cultural darkness in the art of our times through the works of Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Hito Steyerl, and others. In short, we will traverse darkness as a chaotic force to be contained, as a technology to be controlled, and as a relic to be preserved and interrogated.
On the Town: A Performa Compendium 2016-2021, 2022
An extended review and discussion of Kia LaBeija's Untitled (The Black Act) in relation to Oskar ... more An extended review and discussion of Kia LaBeija's Untitled (The Black Act) in relation to Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet, artificial darkness, and race.
An extended discussion of the work of Walead Beshty in relation to materialist, ethical, legal, g... more An extended discussion of the work of Walead Beshty in relation to materialist, ethical, legal, governmental, architectural, and corporate transparency, in particular the ideological drift of transparency from the early 20th century to the present.
On a new body of large-scale camera obscura photographs by Vera Lutter made during a residency at... more On a new body of large-scale camera obscura photographs by Vera Lutter made during a residency at LACMA. In this body of work, Lutter documents the grounds, architecture, galleries, and individual works of the "old" LACMA before it was torn down.
On Jean Epstein's theory and practice of time manipulation in cinema, esp. in Le Tempestaire and ... more On Jean Epstein's theory and practice of time manipulation in cinema, esp. in Le Tempestaire and The Intelligence of a Machine.
Taking cues from architecture, painting, and experimental cinema, Noam Elcott maps three distinct... more Taking cues from architecture, painting, and experimental cinema, Noam Elcott maps three distinct paradigms for the format of the vertically oriented screen (i.e. portrait format). Portraiture-the erect human figure or face-may be understood as the eponymous and paradigmatic form of this vertical format. Vertical screens also align with the celluloid strips that run vertically through nearly all projectors, whose properties were interrogated by postwar avant-gardes and have taken on renewed urgency in light of celluloid's impending obsolescence. Finally, the luminous verticality of stained glass windows helped define the Gothic order, which provided a model for avant-garde experiments in light and space for a century or more, and which have suddenly returned to centre stage in contemporary art. Elcott's three distinct paradigms map a centuries-long encounter with vertical screens that resonate unexpectedly yet unambiguously in the present.
On new, large scale photographs by Anthony McCall.
Elcott, Noam M. "Smoke Screen." Aperture, no... more On new, large scale photographs by Anthony McCall.
Elcott, Noam M. "Smoke Screen." Aperture, no. 231 (2018): 72-77.
At their most basic, the cinematic imaginary and the photographic fact help explain how specific ... more At their most basic, the cinematic imaginary and the photographic fact help explain how specific techniques or even individual artworks could be viewed as quintessentially cinematic in the interwar period and archetypally photographic after the War. The interwar and post-WWII avant- gardes were possessed by media whose direct products were virtually absent. In the 1920s, avant-garde films were rarities even as the avant-garde cinematic imaginary reigned supreme. The 1960s and ’70s avant-gardes marshaled photography everywhere and produced photographs (as such) nowhere.
Elcott, Noam M. "The Cinematic Imaginary and the Photographic Fact: Media as Models for 20th Century Art." PhotoResearcher, no. 29 (2018): 7-23.
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Papers by Noam Elcott
We conceived of this issue, “Art beyond Copyright,” nearly two
years ago. Our position was and remains, first, that copyright law
stands in direct opposition to art historians and is irrelevant to the
vast multitude of practicing artists; and, second, that the myopic
focus on copyright has blinded attention to conceptually and his-
torically distinct facets of the law that inflect art practice, art history,
and art law. The inadequacy of copyright and the imperative to seek
out alternatives for art and law are the focus of this special issue of
Grey Room.
The short history that follows unfolds in three acts. First, I will briefly interrogate the dark side of enlightenment as ideology and technology, particularly how they interlink violently in eighteenth-century United States. Second, I will revisit the myths that undergird the rise of artificial darkness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, I will sketch several trajectories of technological and cultural darkness in the art of our times through the works of Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Hito Steyerl, and others. In short, we will traverse darkness as a chaotic force to be contained, as a technology to be controlled, and as a relic to be preserved and interrogated.
Elcott, Noam M. "Smoke Screen." Aperture, no. 231 (2018): 72-77.
The interwar and post-WWII avant- gardes were possessed by media whose direct products were virtually absent. In the 1920s, avant-garde films were rarities even as the avant-garde cinematic imaginary reigned supreme. The 1960s and ’70s avant-gardes marshaled photography everywhere and produced photographs (as such) nowhere.
Elcott, Noam M. "The Cinematic Imaginary and the Photographic Fact: Media as Models for 20th Century Art." PhotoResearcher, no. 29 (2018): 7-23.
Elcott, Noam M. "Picture Industry." Artforum International 56, no. 4 (December 2017): 188-89.
We conceived of this issue, “Art beyond Copyright,” nearly two
years ago. Our position was and remains, first, that copyright law
stands in direct opposition to art historians and is irrelevant to the
vast multitude of practicing artists; and, second, that the myopic
focus on copyright has blinded attention to conceptually and his-
torically distinct facets of the law that inflect art practice, art history,
and art law. The inadequacy of copyright and the imperative to seek
out alternatives for art and law are the focus of this special issue of
Grey Room.
The short history that follows unfolds in three acts. First, I will briefly interrogate the dark side of enlightenment as ideology and technology, particularly how they interlink violently in eighteenth-century United States. Second, I will revisit the myths that undergird the rise of artificial darkness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, I will sketch several trajectories of technological and cultural darkness in the art of our times through the works of Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Hito Steyerl, and others. In short, we will traverse darkness as a chaotic force to be contained, as a technology to be controlled, and as a relic to be preserved and interrogated.
Elcott, Noam M. "Smoke Screen." Aperture, no. 231 (2018): 72-77.
The interwar and post-WWII avant- gardes were possessed by media whose direct products were virtually absent. In the 1920s, avant-garde films were rarities even as the avant-garde cinematic imaginary reigned supreme. The 1960s and ’70s avant-gardes marshaled photography everywhere and produced photographs (as such) nowhere.
Elcott, Noam M. "The Cinematic Imaginary and the Photographic Fact: Media as Models for 20th Century Art." PhotoResearcher, no. 29 (2018): 7-23.
Elcott, Noam M. "Picture Industry." Artforum International 56, no. 4 (December 2017): 188-89.