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.”

Art, Criticism, Emergency

Bad New Days

ame 

“A product of the industrial revolution,” his kitsch was an ersatz version of “genuine culture”, which the bourgeoisie, now dominant, sold to peasentry-turned-proletariat, which had lost its own folk traditions on coming to the city. Soon mass-produced kitsch became “the first universal culture ever beheld” and as such supported “the illusion that masses actually rule”.

Bad New Days quotes

Join the club