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Some months ago, the New York Times ran a story about the fools in MoMA snapping pix of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, 1889. I was saddened that such phenomena merited comment, so I was utterly dismayed to open David Joselit's densely thoughtful new book and find in its opening pages that this primitive herd behaviour merits full theorisation. Mercifully, however, it turns out to be only a motif in his argument, rather than its crux. Why do folk want to own images, Joselit asks, and what does this possessive impulse tell us about modern art and racial politics? For Joselit, snapping - or owning, stealing - pictures, is what Napoleon was doing when he raided the vaults of the conquered and brought his loot to the Louvre. In a more nuanced way, it's also what animated the 2017 Whitney Biennial controversy over Dana Schutz's painting Open Casket, 2016, which depicted the brutalised corpse of the black teenager Emmett Till, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
The early pages of Art's Properties, on Napoleon and the Louvre, don't offer much to surprise or quarrel with, but the argument takes interesting turns when Joselit elaborates the theoretical heart of the...