“... In his account of late capitalism Fredric Jameson describes its cultural logic as if it were a schizophrenic – broken in language, amnesiac about history, in thrall to glossy images, subject to mood-swings from speedy euphoria to catatonic withdrawal. No wonder that his exemplar is Andy Warhol. ‘Warhol distrusted language,’ Wayne Koestenbaum writes on the first page of his smart biography; ‘he didn’t understand how grammar unfolded episodically in linear time, rather than in one violent atemporal explosion ...”

“... Although​ André Breton wasn’t the first to use the term ‘surrealism’, he made it his own with his first Manifesto in 1924. There he defined the fledgling movement as a ‘quest’ to discover ‘the marvellous’ in the mundane and to work towards the ‘future resolution’ of dreaming and waking. While this lofty goal was new enough, the means applied to it, such as playful operations of chance and sudden collisions of disparate words or images, were prepared by Dada ...”

“... the pigment of Cézanne (or, more proximately, Willem de Kooning) mixed in the wax of Duchamp. Foster GalleryFor some critics, turning serial things into singular paintings was a conservative operation, a win for high culture over low. And in 1960, when Johns first made exquisite replicas in painted bronze of trashy things like two Ballantine ale cans or a ...”

“... Biographies​ of artists often tie the art too directly to the life, as though dramatic experiences were iconographic keys that unlock the work once and for all. Early accounts of artists were modelled on the legends of heroes and saints, and even today they tend towards the epic in scope and hagiographic in tone. Magritte mostly avoids these traps; it is deeply researched, stylishly written and unusually insightful about its subject ...”

“... T.J.​ Clark begins If These Apples Should Fall with a restaging of his first encounter with Cézanne, when as a 15-year-old in 1958 he was amazed by a reproduction of The Basket of Apples: ‘I think I can retrieve the feeling even sixty years later.’ This is one version of ‘the present’ in his subtitle, the summoning of a then of Cézanne painting and Clark looking into a now of his writing and our reading ...”

“... Art​ history was shaken in the 1970s and 1980s, and the epicentre was 19th-century art. Emboldened by the resurgent Marxism and feminism of the 1960s, engaged scholars including T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other fields as well ...”

“... When a man​ tips his hat on the street, we take it as a friendly greeting. That’s what it means to read visual signs ‘iconographically’, Erwin Panofsky writes in his classic essay ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art’, from 1939 (when men still wore hats and some were friendly). The tipping of the hat, he speculates, began as a chivalric gesture, the removing of the helmet to show that one was unarmed (the handshake might have had a similar long-lost origin ...”

“... In Delirious New York (1978), his ‘retroactive manifesto’ for Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas published an old tinted postcard of the city skyline in the early 1930s. It presents the Empire State, Chrysler, and other landmark buildings of the time with a visionary twist – a dirigible is set to dock at the spire of the Empire State. It is an image of the 20th-century city as a spectacle of new tourism, to be sure, but also as a utopia of new spaces – people are free to circulate from the street, up through the tower, to the sky, and back down again ...”

“... Barnett Newman​ was an ‘eminence’ in the postwar art world, Amy Newman (no relation) writes in her exhaustive biography; at the time of his death in 1970 no one in his cohort was more revered. Yet today he is largely forgotten, which is one indication of how much the terms of art have changed. Was he eclipsed by the many artists he influenced, and are they now eclipsed in turn?Born in 1905 in a tenement on the Lower East Side, Barney (as friends called him) was the oldest child of Abraham and Anna Naiman, Jews from Poland who had arrived in New York five years before ...”

“... 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 Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), which argued that modernism’s prewar optimism was over and done. ‘We have already entered the Second Machine Age,’ Banham declared, ‘and can look back on the First … as a period of the past ...”

“... salt will encounter, severally or federated, the critics Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss. This quartet have been working together since the 1970s, and are currently co-editors of the journal October. Founded in 1976 and subtitled ‘Art/Theory/Criticism/Politics’, October introduced a generation of academics to ...”

“... the capacity for autonomous form-creation that had traditionally been the province of sculpture. Hal Foster was one of the first openly to dispute Gehry’s coronation. ‘Is this designer of metallic museums and curvy concert halls, luxury houses and flashy corporate headquarters,’ he asked in the LRB (23 August 2001), ‘truly Our Greatest Living ...”

“... by Michael Polanyi, Paul Ricoeur, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Stephen Best, Toril Moi, Hal Foster, Namwali Serpell and others. Her current work is perhaps the liveliest and least plangent forum for questions about how to read and write criticism after theory. But read in isolation from this larger and longer conversation, it can look ...”

“... longer privileges the arts in relation to society or attempts to impose an aesthetic ideology. As Hal Foster observed (in a collection first published in 1983 as The Anti-Aesthetic and now, perhaps significantly, retitled Postmodern Culture), ‘the artifact is [now] likely to be treated less as a work in modernist terms – unique, symbolic, visionary ...”

“... So come delight in the city again, swap stories, argue politics, see a show, have a drink. Hal Foster New York If I had been there and seen it up close in New York or Washington, I, too, might cry out for revenge. But I have been there at other times: in Libya, when American warplanes punished people who were asleep and unarmed; in Iraq, when ...”