Noam M. Elcott

Modern and Contemporary Art and Media
Ph.D., Princeton University, 2009

Noam M. Elcott writes, teaches, and advises students in the history of modern art and media in Europe and North America, with emphases on the early 20th century; media, especially photography, film, and recent developments in artificial intelligence; and law, especially intellectual property law. He is the recipient, among other awards, of the 2021 Columbia College Great Teacher Award.

Elcott is the author of Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (University of Chicago Press), winner of the 2017 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award. Encompassing diverse figures such as Étienne-Jules Marey and Richard Wagner, Georges Méliès and Oskar Schlemmer, Elcott's book is the first to conceive, historicize, and theorize artificial darkness and the art and media that gave it form. 

Elcott is currently at work on two book projects: Photography, Identity, Status: August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press), which aims to be the definitive account of Sander’s epochal work, and Art™: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks, which recounts the intertwined histories of modern art and modern trademarks, from Manet’s Bar through Basquiat’s explosive use of copyright© and trademark™® symbols.

Elcott is an editor of the journal Grey Room which brings together scholarly and theoretical articles from the fields of architecture, art, media, and politics. He is a founding member of the Center for Comparative Media, which gathers scholars and doctoral students from diverse disciplines to map and interrogate our mediated world across expanses of time (history and archaeology), space (globalization), and across diverse media technologies and techniques. He also directed (with Sarah H. Meister) of The August Sander Project (MoMA/Columbia), a five-year initiative exploring Sander's epic photo-portrait of German society People of the Twentieth Century. His articles have appeared in leading journals like Grey Room, October, and Aperture, as well as in many museum catalogues and scholarly volumes, including monographic essays on Anthony McCall, Stan Douglas, Vera Lutter, Walead Beshty, Jean Epstein, Kia LaBeija, James Welling, the London Film-Makers' Co-op, and others.

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 Critical Inquiry, The Times Literary Supplement, Art History, CAA Reviews, The Architectural Review, Transbordeur, NECSUS, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford), Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny (English), Les Cahiers du Musée National d'Art Moderne, Millennium Film Journal, Senses of Cinema, Choice, Pro Photo Daily, The Art Newspaper, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, Prefix Photo, Digicult. Also featured in AnOther Magazine and BBC's The Forum.

“The Manufacturer’s Signature: Trademarks and Other Signs of Authenticity on Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère.” Grey Room 94 (Winter 2024): 114-63.

“Special Issue: Art After Copyright.” Grey Room 94 (Winter 2024). Editor, with Amy Adler.

“Kubism™: Picasso, Trademarks, and Bouillon Cube.” Arts 13, no. 1 (2024).

“A plein volume: Basquiat et la musique (Montréal); Basquiat Soundtracks (Paris) + Basquiat x Warhol: à quatre mains.” Critique d’art 61 (Winter 2024).

“Art in the First Screen Age: László Moholy-Nagy and the Affordances of Surfaces, Canvases, and Scrims.” New German Critique 51, no. 1 (2024).

“Abstract/Black/Bodies: Kia LaBeija’s (Untitled) The Black Act.” In On the Town: A Performa Compendium 2016-2021, edited by Roselee Goldberg and Charles Aubin, 266-79. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2022.

“A Brief History of Artificial Darkness and Race.” In Rethinking Darkness: Borders, Landscapes, Practices, edited by Nick Dunn and Timothy Edensor, 61-76. London: Routledge, 2021.

"The Master of Time: Jean Epstein’s Nonhuman Time Axis Manipulation." In Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities, edited by Antonio Somaini and Marie Rebecchi, 163-83. Milan: Skira, 2020.

"Walead Beshty: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Materialist Transparency." In Walead Beshty: Work in Exhibition, edited by Lynn Kost. London: Koenig, 2020.

"Windows on an Absent World." In Vera Lutter: Museum Pictures, 96-109. Los Angeles: LACMA, 2020.

"Loops, or The Wave." In Universalenzyklopädie der Menschlichen Klugheit, edited by Markus Krajewski and Harun Maye, 231-35. Berlin: Kadmos, 2019.

"Calder/Photography: Images in Limbo and Nonhuman Perception." In Calder: Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere, 120-39. New York: Pace Gallery, 2019.

"Material. Human. Divine. Notes on the Vertical Screen." In Screen Genealogies—From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, edited by Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe and Francesco Casetti, 293-319. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019.

"The Cinematic Imaginary and the Photographic Fact: Media as Models for 20th Century Art." PhotoResearcher, no. 29 (2018): 7-23.

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.