Bad New Days Art, Criticism, Emergency

Description

Bad New Days looks back at the last 25 years of artistic practice in Western Europe and North America, positioning it in relation to a general condition of emergency that neoliberalism and the war of terror have brought with them. Foster argues that art has actually anticipated this condition, at times miming the collapse of the social contract, at other times resisting it, and at still other times exacerbating it critically. Against the assumption that art no longer heeds any model, he also offers several paradigms of practice over this period, which he terms "abject," "archival," "mimetic," and "precarious."

Author description

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a 2014-15 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A co-editor of October magazine and books, he is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic and the author of Design and Crime, Recording, The Return of the Real, Compulsive Beauty and The Art-Architecture Complex.