The first half of Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness, David Joselit’s essay fails to connect and explain any semblance of a theory, opinion or stance. Nor does he emphasize or reason the change of Modern and Postmodern aesthetic values,. Instead Joselit throws together the works of Jackson Pollock, Jasper Jones, David Hammons and Kara Walker, the theorizes of Fredric Jameson, Clement Greenberg, Michel Faucault, Earnesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and key worlds such as psychological depth, stereotype, flatness, expressive containment, identification and articulation. His goal of tracking the ‘genealogy of flatness’ falls flat and is instead lost in an all-encompassing assemblage of contradictory and disorganized art, ideas and linguistics.

But Joselit is able to redeem himself in the latter part of his essay, in which he comes to a focused conclusion of the analysis and articulation of psychological and optical flatness in relation to one another in 20^th century definition modern and postmodern art. He explained “flatness may serve as a powerful metaphor for the price we pay in transforming ourselves into images- a compulsory self-spectacularization which is the necessary condition of entering the public sphere in the world of capitalism”. Joselit takes apart the idea of form, flatness and depth in order to create a new language to validate that “within them, the psychological, the optical and the political are intricately interwoven.” No longer is there a separation between such aesthetics and entities but a new language derived to be able to characterize and explain; identity as form, form as identity, the conscious and unconscious, the articulator and the articulated, identity defined only by context, the similarities of modern and postmodern ideas and art. The emphasis of historical and political context incorporated into the form of a piece of art to provoke identity and meaning is exemplary of how, and why “the language of political theory approaches the idiom of art criticism”.

Joselit, David. " Notes on Surface : Towards a Genelogy of Flatness". Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Ed. Zoya, Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2005. pp 292-308.