Noam M. Elcott
Noam M. Elcott is Associate Professor for the history of modern art at Columbia University, an editor of the journal Grey Room, and the author of the award-winning book Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Elcott 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 for a Data Science Institute grant on “AI and Style: Art, Technology, Law.” His current book projects are The Social Portrait: Types and Antitypes in August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century and ArtTM: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks.
Like a reverie within a reverie, Salvador Dalí’s dream sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) peels back the unconscious before a room full of somnambulant spectators dispersed across IKEA couches. It’s just past 2:30 a.m. in Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Twelve hours earlier, alert viewers sat transfixed before larger-than-life Hollywood icons. In the dead of night, the gap between slumbering stars and fatigued viewers has shriveled.
