Modern and Contemporary Art and Media
Noam M. Elcott is Associate Professor for the history of modern art at Columbia. Elcott is the author of the award-winning book Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2016), as well as essays on art and media from the 19th century to the present, published in leading journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues. He co-directed The August Sander Project (MoMA/Columbia, 2016-2021), co-edited a special issue of Grey Room on “Art Beyond Copyright” (2024), and is a principal investigator of the Data Science Institute grant on “Art Images and AI: Latent Space Interpretability, Art History, and the Law.” His current book projects are The Social Status Portrait: August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century and Art™: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks.
Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media. University of Chicago Press, 2016.
• Winner of the 2017 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award.
• Finalist for the 2017 First Book Prize from the Modernist Studies Association.
• Reviewed in caa.reviews, Critical Inquiry, The Times Literary Supplement, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford), Les Cahiers du Musée National d'Art Moderne, Millennium Film Journal, Choice, Pro Photo Daily, The Art Newspaper, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, Prefix Photo, Digicult. Also featured in AnOther Magazine and BBC's The Forum.
Artforum reviews on László Moholy-Nagy Retrospective (2016), Peter Gidal and the London Film-Makers' Co-operative (2017), and "Picture Industry" (2017).
"The Phantasmagoric Dispositif: An Assembly of Bodies and Images in Real Time and Space." Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): 42-71.
"Experimentation, from Darkroom to Laptop." In Photography at Moma: 1960 until Now, edited by Quentin Bajac, Lucy Gallun, Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Hermanson Meister, 316-19. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015.
"'Kaleidoscope-Architecture': Scheerbart, Taut, and the Glass House." In Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader, edited by Josia McElheny and Christine Burgin, 110-17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
"In Search of Lost Space: Stan Douglas's Archaeology of Mediated Darkness." October 139 (2012): 151-182.
"Anthony McCall and the Mediation of Immediacy." In Anthony McCall: Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture, 20-53. Berlin: Walther König, 2012.
"Rooms of Our Time: László Moholy-Nagy and the Stillbirth of Multi-Media Museums." In Screen/Space, edited by Tamara Trodd, 25-52. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.
"Untimely Detritus: Christian Marclay's Cyanotypes." In Christian Marclay: Cyanotypes. Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2011.
Anthologized in On & By Christian Marclay. London: Whitechapel Gallery; MIT, 2014.
"Reflections on Glass Houses." In James Welling: Glass House, 63-92. Bologna: Damiani, 2011.
"Darkened Rooms: A Genealogy of Avant-Garde Filmstrips from Man Ray to the London Film Makers' Co-op and Back Again," Grey Room 30, Winter 2008.