Hal Foster teaches art history at Princeton. He has written widely on postmodernism, the avant-garde and aesthetic theory, both in the LRB and in his books, which include Recodings, The Return of the Real and The First Pop Age. He edited the influential essay collection The Anti-Aesthetic. Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics was published in February 2025.
Why go to the Venice Biennale and further burden a city already sinking under the pressure of its own attractiveness? It’s simple: the Biennale remains the best crash-course in contemporary art, with two major surveys, a score of national pavilions, and sundry projects scattered around town, sometimes in exquisite churches or palazzi. Documenta, the other prestigious international...
In this age of heightened spectacle and surveillance, kitsch seems an innocuous form of cultural persuasion and political manipulation. Yet since 9/11 it has returned with a vengeance in the US, with an effective brand that might as well be called ‘Bush kitsch’.
The word ‘kitsch’ comes from the German verkitschen, ‘to make cheap’, and an elitist concern...
‘The Gates’, the orange portals and banners that punctuated many of the paths in Central Park from 12 to 27 February, were greeted with great delight. People were first softened up by the numbers – 7532 portals, 5290 tons of steel, 60 miles of vinyl tubing, 116,389 miles of pleated nylon, 23 miles of trails, $21 million in costs – and then worked over by all the wacky...
“Such is the predicament of MoMA vis-à-vis the expanded field of contemporary art: how to contain, let alone to present, work that is immense, site-specific, and/or project-based? Here as elsewhere the response is better big than sorry – big as in 15,000 square feet with walls 21 feet high. But not all contemporary artists require the room that Serra needs (he will have a retrospective here in 2007); his scale shouldn’t be the norm. Huge is not necessarily flexible; in fact it can be quite rigid. Flexible can mean a mix of large and small spaces, and no doubt that is what we will see in the future. Yet the high walls will remain difficult: not much else can hold such a white field except extreme Minimalism or painterly bombast”
I n the early 1950s I was awakened by the photographs of Walker Evans and the movies of John Ford, especially Grapes of Wrath where the poor ‘Okies’ go to California with mattresses on their cars rather than stay in Oklahoma and starve. I faced a sort of black-and-white cinematic identity crisis myself in this respect … a little like trading dust for oranges. On the way to...
Hal Foster reads his review of the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at Tate Modern.
When Hal Foster uses the word ‘first’ in the title of his confidently focused study, he means to start us thinking about Pop now and then. It is a reference to Reyner Banham’s
Helen Gardner’s benevolently dictatorial Art through the Ages was published in 1926, and remained the pre-eminent survey for American undergraduates until 1962, when H.W. Janson’s
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