Expendabilia 
Hal Foster
- Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future by Nigel Whiteley
Reyner Banham was as smart and sassy as any critic in the postwar period. What made him distinctive was his passion for the edgiest expressions of his technological age, not only in avant-garde architecture but in anything designed – Cadillacs and transistor radios, custom hot-rods and painted surfboards, gadgets and gizmos; all of which he discussed with great verve in 12 books and over 700 articles. Less of a media guru than Marshall McLuhan, he did possess some of McLuhan’s Futurist zeal and crossover appeal; not an inventor like Buckminster Fuller, he projected some of the technological know-how and visionary asperity of the older American. More Pop than either man, Banham became, like them, a celebrated outsider – a hit-man turned target.
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Hal Foster chairs the department of art and archaeology at Princeton.
Other articles by this contributor:
At the Guggenheim · Russian Art
At the Guggenheim · Pop Surrealism
The Great US Election Disaster · Hal Foster writes about the 2000 US Presidential Election
At the Grand Palais · Richard Serra
At the Guggenheim · David Smith
It’s Modern but is it contemporary? · The Trouble with MoMA
At Dia:Beacon · Hal Foster at Dia:Beacon
At the Whitney · Ed Ruscha’s Hollywood Sublime
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