AFVS Faculty member Prof. David Joselit’s book Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization has won the 2021 Robert Motherwell Book Award from the Dedalus Foundation.
From the Dedalus Foundation website:
The winner of the 2021 Robert Motherwell Book Award is Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Harvard University Press) by David Joselit.
In Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists from around the world serves as a means of combating modern art’s legacy of Eurocentrism. While modernism claimed to live in the future and to have relegated the rest of the world to the past, Joselit shows how global contemporary art shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage in order to propose new and different futures. He analyzes not only how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual artists, but also how a cultural infrastructure of museums and art fairs worldwide has emerged as a means of generating economic value, attracting capital and tourist dollars.
The Robert Motherwell Book Award is given annually and carries a prize of $10,000 awarded to the author of an outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts – including the visual arts, literature, music and the performing arts. Nominations are made by publishers, and the winner is chosen by a panel of distinguished scholars and writers.
