Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency

by Hal Foster

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.”

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Theory, Philosophy, Criticism, Cultural, Art History

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 8, 2015

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

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Hal Foster on contemporary art gives you the same sociological/ideological-critical thrills as Zizek at his best, through a similarly Lacan-tinted lens, but you get the added bonus of beautiful color reproductions of artwork. His analyses speak around the works and always point back toward the culture which has produced them - our broken culture-thing, whatever indeterminate substance that might be now in 2018 - so they also function as a strange guide to navigating the Anthropocene. Highly recommended, even if you don't know the works discussed. I didn't.

[CM · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am usually not a fan of essay collection, even less so when the author/publisher present it as if it was more than a collection, which is exactly the case here. But it's hard to deny that these essays on keywords/strategies/styles*, offered by the leading art critic of our time on contemporary art, are filled with erudite, insightful interpretation. The shorter piece on the post-critical debate, a recent development in literary and art criticism on the limitation of all forms of criticism, is definitely not to be missed for its helpful summary on the arguments of Latour and Ranciere. It's just that readers should note where (and when) these essays were published and the rather lengthy notes at the back.

*they are abject, mimesis, archival, precarious

[Margot Dower · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt a bit sluggish reading this: maybe I needed to give it more attention, to attend to it more closely, but I couldn’t quite hack into its very steely spine. I loved the bits on Hirschhorn, and Tacita Dean, though then again, I already love their work. I thought the discussion of the “archival” was interesting and illuminating. Good writing, good text! Just couldn’t meet this book where it was.

[Seda Tezcan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hal Foster Greenbergden daha Greenberg. Savlarının altını yeterince doldurmamış. Tarihselliği göz ardı ederek düşünce insanlarının neden sonuç ilişkileri ile dolu fikirlerini 1er paragrafta çürütebileceğine inanmış. Yaşı ve tecrübesi itibariyle yöntemsizliği ve muhakemesinin zayıflığı şaşırtıcıydı. Kitabın girişindeki mütevazılığı içerikte göremedim. Dişleri vardı ama yeterince keskinde değildi. Isırdı ama acımadı.

[Nathan Fisher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Foster's prose really takes off here, as does his ability to discern the political and aesthetic assumptions behind various formal schools or critical postures. The letdown to me is twofold, though -- one is his (hardly unique) method of pinballing between interlocutors while maintaining a certain professorial distance from this 'material,' which lends this a weighty knowingness that can seem dutiful or passionless, a semi-dissatisfying polemic of judiciousness -- the second is my slight inability (not unlikely my own damn fault) to sense the bedrock of his criticism and my nagging suspicion that what registers or appears here as 'good art' is less dependent on a set of propositions Foster is adhering to than it is on the rhetorical mode in which it is perceived or discussed. That is to say, the real 'object' of the criticism is sometimes hard to make out beyond the fortifications of the criticism itself, and even this 'criticism' sometimes seems lost or preoccupied with its rhetorical elaborations. Reading his section on the paranoid tendency -- 'for what is paranoia if not a practice of forced connections, of my own private archive, of my own notes from the underground, put on display?' . . . 'the paranoic projects his meanings onto the world precisely because it appears ominously drained of all significance' -- and I'm struck by how incisive, nimble, and brilliant his observations are, and yet how far I feel from their 'significance.'

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does your love of John Cage's oeuvre fashion you an intellectual huckster? Thanks to Hal Foster, I now know that unless such minimalist-experimental sounds are enjoyed with a fetishistic passivity found in the tumescent conviction that Cage's many demurring silences are a space where everything is always arranged for oneself, and his positive musics are confirmation beeps signifying the progress of a post-structural program busy limning correct meanings for you, and you believe Big Data and content marketing and SEO are really posthumous post-human poetry, and so something will come and get you if your subjective activation regains social relevance, no. Not at all.

[Dorian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well desinged book useful for introducing oneself to the aestethic and political issues contemporary artists engage with. Written with precision and wit.

[Bill Brydon · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...even as the gaze can trap the subject, the subject can tame the gaze, at least provisionally. This is the function of the image screen: to negotiate a “laying down” of the gaze in the sense of a laying down of a weapon."

"...in Powers of Horror, Kristeva suggests that a cultural shift has occurred in recent decades. “In a world in which the Other has collapsed,” she states enigmatically, the task of the artist is no longer to sublimate the abject but to plumb it—to fathom “the bottomless ‘primacy’ constituted by primal repression.”..."As defined by Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1980), the abject is what a subject must get rid of in order to be a subject at all. It is a fantasmatic substance that is both alien to the subject and intimate with it, too much so in fact, and this overproximity produces a panic in the subject. In this way, the abject touches on the fragility not only of our boundaries, of the distinction between our insides and outsides, but also of the passage from the maternal body to the paternal law."

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the easiest read, poststructuralism at its complicated best. But Foster gives very good theoretical toolkit of looking at the contemporary art by looking at its various paradigms: abject, mimetic, archival, precarious, post-critical. A great reference book.

[Mack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciate Hal Foster’s ability to balance critical theory, his own philosophy, cultural anecdotes, and sass.

[Anaclara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goeike!

[Jorge Terrones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesante, pero no está a la altura de sus anteriores libros. "The return of the real": ahí está el genio de Foster. Aquí, no.

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Foster does well to identify currents in an increasingly oceanic art world.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bold attempt at categorizing contemporary art into broad themes, and a fairly successful one at that.

[Edward Cardini]

About nonsense

A good read for anyone who thinks anything can be art. I am personally insulted by what passes for art these days.

[xiao yun · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing of contemporary arts into the trajectory of everyday life, continuing the relevance of contemporary art in contemporary society.