One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice
Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.
Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it.
Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”
“Deft, opinionated … Foster is one of those rare art theorists whose measured prose can engage a wider readership, cutting through the philosophical inflationism that afflicts much of the higher gossip among art critics.” —Guardian
“Bad New Days attempts to recover the idea of an avant-garde after a hard half-century of infighting, obfuscation, rivalry, and successive failures to engage with the real world of politics.” —Mark Kingwell, Harper’s
“Foster’s strength lies in his erudite attention to those artists that have emerged as definitive of their particular moment.” —Mostafa Heddaya, Artinfo
“His influence is considerable, reaching well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of modern and contemporary art into architecture, literature, and critical theory—all arenas in which Foster is an authority. His formidable powers of analysis and explication are deployed, more often than not, in the service of disruption and destabilization, and his work is as polarizing as it is revelatory.” —White Review
“Considering recent paradigms of art ranging from ‘abject’ to ‘postcritical,’ Foster uses his plain, incisive style to help locate the failures of contemporary art in hopes that more novel and critical art can come to the fore.” —ArtSlant
Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a 2014–15 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A co-editor of October magazine and books, he is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic and the author of Design and Crime, Recording, The Return of the Real, Compulsive Beauty and The Art-Architecture Complex.
One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice
Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.
Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it.
Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”
Praise
“Deft, opinionated … Foster is one of those rare art theorists whose measured prose can engage a wider readership, cutting through the philosophical inflationism that afflicts much of the higher gossip among art critics.” —Guardian
“Bad New Days attempts to recover the idea of an avant-garde after a hard half-century of infighting, obfuscation, rivalry, and successive failures to engage with the real world of politics.” —Mark Kingwell, Harper’s
“Foster’s strength lies in his erudite attention to those artists that have emerged as definitive of their particular moment.” —Mostafa Heddaya, Artinfo
“His influence is considerable, reaching well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of modern and contemporary art into architecture, literature, and critical theory—all arenas in which Foster is an authority. His formidable powers of analysis and explication are deployed, more often than not, in the service of disruption and destabilization, and his work is as polarizing as it is revelatory.” —White Review
“Considering recent paradigms of art ranging from ‘abject’ to ‘postcritical,’ Foster uses his plain, incisive style to help locate the failures of contemporary art in hopes that more novel and critical art can come to the fore.” —ArtSlant
Author
Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a 2014–15 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A co-editor of October magazine and books, he is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic and the author of Design and Crime, Recording, The Return of the Real, Compulsive Beauty and The Art-Architecture Complex.
