In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-ga
"In exhilarating, thoughtful and subtle arguments, Foster takes surrealist interpretations of psychoanalysis into a shocking encounter with the Freudian uncanny.... [An] extremely important book". -- Jane Beckett, "Times Higher Education Supplement" Surre
For the past thirty years, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent cri
In the first half of this book, Hal Foster surveys our new ‘political economy of design,’ exploring the marketing of culture and the branding of identity, the development of spectacle-architecture and the rise of global cities. In the second half, he
In this groundbreaking and original work of scholarship, four of the most influential and provocative art historians of our time have come together to provide a comprehensive history of art in the 20th and 21s centuries, an age when artists have sought co