Hal Foster

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.

What does a Princeton graduate whose old dream it was to write for the New Yorker do when that dream comes true, only to discover that his cherished magazine is no longer the middlebrow arbiter of high culture of his imagining, but just another media outlet frantic for its market share of mass culture? On one level Nobrow is the story of this rude awakening, the Bildungsroman of a smart ex-preppie caught between the old ‘Townhouse’ of good taste, as vetted by the New Yorker of lore, and the new ‘Megastore’ where culture and marketing are one, as exemplified by the Star Wars industry. Born to the old world (‘taste was my cultural capital, boiled down to a syrup’), John Seabrook, a critic at large for the New Yorker, wanders in the new, but this desert of ‘Nobrow’ – where the old ‘brow’ distinctions no longer seem to apply – is not so arid to him. In fact he drinks more deeply at the oases of Nobrow culture (a Chemical Brothers concert, for example, which he experiences as ‘an intense moment of ecstatic communion with youth’) than he does in the gardens of highbrow culture – ‘interesting plays, the Rothko show, the opera and, sometimes, downtown happenings’.’‘

Letter

The Phoneless Masses

21 September 2000

When, in my review of Nobrow by John Seabrook, I invoked the ‘phoneless masses’, it was not to suggest, as Laura Mandell has it (Letters, 2 November), that I am deeply in touch with them: it was only to question Seabrook’s breezy assumption that everybody’s now on line and in line with the world of the media-entertainment conglomerates. it’s his totalisation that was at issue, not mine. Nonetheless,...

The Great US Election Disaster

Hal Foster, 30 November 2000

Who would have thought it? George W. Bush as President. I almost forgot what nauseated disbelief was like: I had not felt it so intensely since Reagan won in 1980. You look around, dazed and confused, and wonder: how did this happen? What is this country that elected this man as its President? (That is, if it did elect him: we still don’t know what happened in Florida, and we may never...

Hey, that’s me: Bruce Mau

Hal Foster, 5 April 2001

The turn of one century calls up others, and 2000 was no exception. Museum shows devoted to Style 1900 or Art Nouveau were on view in London, Paris, New York and other cities. It all looked long ago and far away, this pan-European movement pledged to a Gesamtkunstwerk of arts and crafts, in which everything from architecture to ashtrays was subject to florid design, in which the designer...

Why all the hoopla? Frank Gehry

Hal Foster, 23 August 2001

For many people, Frank Gehry is not only our master architect but our master artist as well. In the current retrospective which is about to transfer from the Guggenheim in New York to the one in Bilbao, he is often called a genius without a blush of embarrassment (Thomas Krens, Guggenheim director and Gehry ‘collaborator’, can’t get enough of the word). Why all the hoopla? Is...

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

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White Hat/Black Hat: 20th-Century Art

Frances Richard, 6 April 2006

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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