Design and Crime

by Hal Foster

In the first half of this book, Hal Foster surveys our new ‘political economy of design,’ exploring the marketing of culture and the branding of identity, the development of spectacle-architecture and the rise of global cities. In the second half, he examines the historical relations of modern art and the modern museum, the conceptual vicissitudes of art history and visual studies, the recent travails of art criticism, and the double aftermath of modernism and postmodernism. Written in a lively style, Design and Crime offers historical sketches and contemporary test-cases in an attempt to illuminate the conditions for critical culture in the present.

Genres: Design, Art, Architecture, Nonfiction, Theory, Essays, Philosophy

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Hal Foster is a Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University specializing in 20th century art.

Note: for the comic book artist, see Harold "Hal" Foster.

Reviews

[Curtis Newbold · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is hard for me to rate. I read it for a doctoral course on visual rhetoric, which was an interesting book choice for such a class. The book is insightful and certainly well-written. It draws on the experiences of the author, an artist concerned with the commodification of society and devaluation of art. I guess the cover gives it full disclosure by parenthetically stating "and other diatribes." I say this book is hard to rate because while it is enlightening, I don't particularly like diatribes, which seem far less reflective and too one-sided. This book is, at its very core, a lamentation and rant, which gets obnoxious. He makes some good points about the dangers of reducing art's value (but didn't Marx already do that???) What I would like to see is a more reflective discussion about how high art's infiltration back into society, while commoditized, at least raises awareness and increases the value proposition of our very visual culture. But, of course, that is my perspective. It certainly isn't Foster's.

[Elif Yigit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tasarım ve Suç, daha çok sanat tarihi, sanat kültürü ve sanat eleştirmenleri konusuna eğiliyor. Kitabın dili maalesef (belki de çeviri hatalarından kaynaklı) hiç akıcı değil. Makalelerde gördüğüm konunun toparlanamaması ve dağılması.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

even though hal foster is sort of a cliche of high-pomo criticism, he's still one of the most sensible and readable critics of the october generation. smart and very historically informed. good stuff.

[Sencer Turunç · Rating 5 out of 5]

Günümüz tasarımı, kapitalizmin post-modernizme ödettiği çok büyük bir bedelin parçası: Sanatları, disiplinleri içiçe geçirmesinin bedeli olarak sınır ihlallerinin olağanlaşması...

Tasarım arzuyla ilgili bir şey ve günümüzde arzu, öznesiz... gibi görünmekte en azından... Görüntüden ibaret derunu olmayan bir narsizm: sığ, yüzeysel... öznenin, kendi yokoluşunu hazırlayan bir kendi kendini putlaştırma aşamasından geçiş söz konusu...

Suç, kural tanımazlık, edepsizlik, ahlaksızlık, tasarımı kışkırtan, ilerleyişin dinamiğini kuran mefhumlar...

[Danae · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muy bacán, sobre todo la idea de un neo-Art Nouveau y el texto sobre Frank Gehry.

[Annabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read enough yet to be able to say whether Foster moves beyond diatribe into vision, but the prospects seem good on that front. A most engaging read, although there's something a bit self-congratulatory in the happiness I feel when reading it, but that might just be the diatribe rubbing off on me.

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Okay, so Foster doesn't offer vision so much as he offers clarity on the state of contemporary visual culture. But clarity is something that has become increasingly rarefied, and so his contribution was quite welcome indeed.

(Also welcome, and fun, is his taking down Great Artists like Gehry a couple notches.)

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Foster splits this collection into two parts, the former half largely focused on architecture theory, the latter on art theory. The title is a reference to Loos' 1908 "Ornament and Crime," which of course had the most profound influence on the functionalist movement in architecture, and the eponymous second chapter is devoted to a reading of the essay (6 years short of a century on), in which Foster seeks to deflate the definiteness of its claims (despite its polemical rhetoric) as merely an attempt to clear the ground in order to create some "running room": Foster similarly targets "design" as that concept which most easily allows art to be subsumed into the commodification circuit, and seeks to in a sense "evacuate" it in order to produce some daylight between the two domains. This is largely framed by the first chapter, which, in line with recent trends to periodize late capitalism, characterizes the postmodern as the collapse of the distinction between high-brow and low-brow in the "Megastore" through a reading of Seabrook's article on "Nobrow" for The New Yorker. However, I remain at least partially suspicious of this attempt to recruit functionalism towards this vaguely anti-capitalist project, especially as regards its framing in opposition to "ornament," for I am consistently reminded of Copjec's treatment of Clérambault in Chapter 4, "The Sartorial Superego," of Read My Desire, in opposition to Le Corbusier's modernism, also ciphered as that between a period summarized by Blondel, and one by Durand—one which sees the sensuous as feminine and thus as "naïve,... frivolous, licentious" as opposed to utility. Returning to Foster, Chapter 3 turns to Gehry, lambasting a certain "Pop-imagistic obviousness" through reading his works in the wake of Venturi, Scott-Brown, and Izenour's Learning From Las Vegas, which by now has been cemented as harbinging the advent of postmodern architecture - Foster even invokes Jameson on this point (on the deliriousness of hyperspace). Chapter 4 offers a reading of Koolhaas' 1978 manifesto Delirious New York, which he sees as splitting the difference between Gropius' Bauhaus (and Le Corbusier's modernism) and the Rockefeller Center, between European urban planning (as epitomized by the Krier brothers' insistence on it) and the populism of Venturi et al., an attempt to maintain the utopianism of the former without its elitism, the populism of the latter without its commercialism. The second half begins with a falter, at least in my reading, as Chapter 5 contends with varying accounts of art in connection with memory, counterposing first Baudelaire and Manet, then Valéry and Proust; Adorno, Benjamin, Malraux, Panofsky, Wölfflin, and Warburg enter the fray—I think the proliferation of references is disorienting for such a short piece, and the combination of philosophical, literary, and art critic figures makes for an uneven treatment, since they encounter each other on the same plane of discussion in order to be able to be made able to speak to and respond to one another, which might erase some of the distinctions between their respective fields from which they are approaching a common problem. I have similar problems with Chapter 6, moving from anthropology to philosophy to art history/theory with a fluidity that might be unbecoming to the intricacies of the epistemological/methodological differences between the disciplines. Chapter 7, meanwhile, is an extremely entertaining gossip-y retelling of the ideological divisions that permeated Artforum in the '60s and '70s, between Greenberg and his detractors, largely over his seemingly conservative insistence on limiting the canon of modernism, unwilling or unable to see the continuities between earlier supported works and later developments (most interesting for me, of course, is Krauss' contribution in the pre-October days). Chapter 8 ends with a more explicit demonstration of art theorizing in practice, with some readings of installations, alongside some ruminations on Krauss, Orozco, et al.

[Nikita · Rating 1 out of 5]

жалкую картину рисуют русский перевод, который едва касается смысла и путается в повествовании, и русское издание - полная мешанина из тире и дефисов разной длинны

[Charlie Kruse · Rating 3 out of 5]

very readable... but sometimes i'm not sure what point foster is making..

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite the swimming hole - a bit bracing at first plunge, but a nice place to float around.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lexicon to enjoy this dialectic:
homunculus: a miniature adult that in the theory of preformation is held to inhabit the germ cell and to produce a mature individual merely by an increase in size
hegemony: the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group
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Now, for the humor I wish to share from the first essay/chapter: Brow Beaten.
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"What are the bearings that this "hegemonculus" takes (this is his [John Seabrook's] funny-awful hybrid of "hegemony" and "homonculus")?..."

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's pretty solid. I have similar and, I suppose, pretty conservative ideas concerning the dangers of attaching anthropomorphic values to knick knacks. The problem here is that Foster falls back on a Marxist, moralistic ultimatum in order to protest. Quite frankly, for me, the problem with fetishistic design is that it compromises the pleasures of a superficially humanist civilization.
In other words, where I like to live.

[Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Needlessly verbose and unclear. The book is slightly interesting at times but any interesting points are buried by unengaging writing and excessive name-dropping. It seems written for a certain reader already engaged in an ongoing art-historical conversation that leaves the book rather inaccessible for anyone just picking it up and unfamiliar with the history of that discourse.

[Kph]

makes me lightheaded. i a good way. mmmh.

[Jodie Gatlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it but I didn't understand a lot of it.

[Ben Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic read