Hal Foster

Biographic Data

ID3594042
NAMEHal Foster
GIVEN NAMESHal
FAMILY NAMEFoster
SIGNATUREFOSTER H
AFFILIATIONSPrinceton University
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS55
TOTAL CITATIONS244
AUTHOR COUNT55
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1984
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX6

  • Cultural Revolution After Jameson

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2025

    I first read Fredric Jameson not long after I graduated from college in 1977. His Marxism and Form (1971) was my introduction to Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, and Adorno, and most of the book flew over my head. One passage stuck with me, though; it is an early example of how effectively Jameson uses specific practices to track general shifts in the phenomenology of capitalist culture: We need only juxtapose the mannequin, as a symbol, with the photogr…

  • Anthony Vidler (1941-2023)

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2024

    On October 19, 2023, we lost Anthony Violer, a longtime friend of this magazine. A brilliant historian of architecture whose deep scholarship and intellectual curiosity ranged from Ledoux to his own contemporaries, Tony was also an astute reader of art and theory, and he was always alert not only to the historical conditions of a given practice but also to its conceptual implications and political ramifications. In manifold ways Tony instructed u…

  • Utopianism of the Will

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2024

    Foster examines the historical tension between utopian and anarchist approaches to social transformation, beginning with Anthony Vidler's 1975 question about how to "refuse the present" while acting within it. Through analysis of competing theoretical frameworks-particularly Manfredo Tafuri's critique of the avant-garde and the dialectic between "Chance" and "Form"-Foster reconsiders the relationship between anarchist and socialist approaches to …

  • Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

    Hal FosterBOOKBrutal Aesthetics2023

  • Штука по 1900 роцi: Модернізм. Антимодернізм. Постмодернізм

    Open AccessHal Foster, Rosalind Krauss et al.ARTICLERocznik Ruskiej Bursy2023

  • Modernism in a Non-Melancholic Key

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2023

    Once again it is time for a reckoning about the status of modernist art in Western Europe and North America. However we frame it, it's now perceived, in artist studios and academic programs alike, as just one formation among others, with no special claim on art practice or art history. No longer central, the field is relative not only to other modern arts in other geopolitical regions but also to all other art-historical fields. In short, it is n…

  • The Object Comes Alive: A Conversation with Claes Oldenburg

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2022

    In this interview, the late Claes Oldenburg looks back on both the motivations and the modalities of his distinctive practice. Among the topics discussed are his signature "guises," such as the Ray Guns and the Flags, the performative basis of his early objects, and his sustained commitment to an aesthetic of shape-shifting

  • Cenas primitivas

    Open AccessHal Foster, Janaína Nagata Otoch et al.ARTICLEARS (São Paulo2021

  • What Comes after Farce

    Hal FosterBOOKWhat Comes after Farce2020

    If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the Left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the…

  • Mudança no MoMA

    Open AccessHal FosterARTICLEARS (São Paulo2020

    Neste texto, Hal Foster examina a iniciativa do Museu de Arte Moderna de Nova York, historicamente reconhecido como bastião do modernismo, de confrontar as transformações no meio artístico global e as novas exigências de um ampliado público de arte. Foster comenta o que vê como os grandes acertos dessa iniciativa - dentre eles, a maior diversidade das obras em relação a gênero, raça e proveniência dos artistas -, mas também os seus problemas, com…

  • A Questionnaire on Decolonization

    Huey Copeland, Hal Foster et al.ARTICLEOctober2020Cited by: 3References: 17

    The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum's structural relation to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its…

  • Everybody's a Critic

    Hal FosterARTICLESouth Atlantic Quarterly2020References: 3

    How did critique become a bad object when, only a few decades ago, it seemed to be the cutting edge of cultural practice? This essay notes some of the recent vicissitudes of the critical enterprise, including the charges that it is destructive, cynical, or simply rote. Rather than a dismissive line, "everybody's a critic" might suggest the arrival of a truly demotic criticism

  • Charisma and Catastrophe

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2019

    For obvious reasons a number of historians have looked back to Europe in the 1920s to see what lessons can be learned from the rise of fascism during that time. Some, such as Timothy Snyder, have drawn powerful lines of connection to the period, while others, like Enzo Traverso, have cautioned that the two situations are too dissimilar to be productively compared. At issue, fundamentally, is the old principle of historia magistra vitae (history a…

  • Interdependent Study

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2019

    A long-time contributor to the Whitney Independent Study Program, Hal Foster discusses how the program has evolved over the years and how his approach to criticism has evolved along with it

  • Père Trump

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2017

    In the face of Trumpism and its peculiar mix of the buffoonish and the lethal, Foster suggests that we "pump up" past theoretical concepts by raising them to a higher degree. Social media, for example, could thereby be considered the "fifth estate," a force that outdoes the "fourth estate" of journalistic media and thereby evacuates the last residues of the public sphere that, over fifty years ago, Jürgen Habermas associated with the advent of pr…

  • On Forensic Architecture: A Conversation with Eyal Weizman

    Open AccessYve-Alain Bois, Michel Feher et al.ARTICLEOctober2016Cited by: 8References: 1

    Yve-Alain Bois, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, and Eyal Weizman discuss "forensic architecture," the practice of treating common elements of our built environment as entry points through which to interrogate the present. Forensic Architecture is also the name of a research agency established by Weizman to undertake independent investigations in the context of armed conflicts, political struggles, and environmental transformation. Participants discuss …

  • Dailiness According to Demand

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2016

    Thomas Demand's Dailies (2008-) are visual aperçus, yet often they trigger a sense of déjà vu, and this paradoxical combination of the fresh and the familiar is typical of Demand. "The images that come to me," he tells Alexander Kluge in an extraordinary conversation, "some are very banal, others greatly laden with meaning, but actually they are all things I know." And we know them too, or think we do. In part, this is because Demand builds his i…

  • Abstraction, 1910–1925: Eight Statements

    Yve-Alain Bois, Masha Chlenova et al.ARTICLEOctober2013Cited by: 1

    January 01 2013 Abstraction, 1910–1925: Eight Statements Yve-Alain Bois, Yve-Alain Bois Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Masha Chlenova, Masha Chlenova MASHA CHLENOVA is Curatorial Assistant at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, where she worked with Leah Dickerman on the exhibition “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Sc…

  • Mímico Dadá

    Open AccessHal FosterARTICLEBoletim de Pesquisa NELIC2012References: 2

    É uma representação célebre, mas ainda assim extraordinária. No dia 23 de junho de 1916, no Cabaret Voltaire, em Zurique, Hugo Ball estreia os seus poemas sonoros ou os poemas-sem-palavras: “As minhas pernas estavam em um cilindro de cartolina azul brilhante que vinha até o meu quadril, assim eu parecia um obelisco”, conta em Voo fora do tempo (Flight out of time), o seu grande diário de 1914-21

  • Creaturely Cobra

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2012Cited by: 1

    July 01 2012 Creaturely Cobra Hal Foster Hal Foster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Hal Foster Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2012 October (2012) (141): 4–21. https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00095 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures …

  • Post-Critical

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2012Cited by: 3

    January 01 2012 Post-Critical Hal Foster Hal Foster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Hal Foster Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2012 October (2012) (139): 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00076 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures &…

  • Towards a Grammar of Emergency

    Hal FosterARTICLENew left review2011Cited by: 1

    The work of Thomas Hirschhorn as artistic primer for a precarious world. Appeals for explanation and engagement in makeshift monuments or plaintive placards, while overflowing installations lay bare the excesses of late capitalism

  • Savage Minds (A Note on Brutalist Bricolage)

    Hal FosterARTICLEOctober2011Cited by: 1

    May 01 2011 Savage Minds (A Note on Brutalist Bricolage) Hal Foster Hal Foster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Hal Foster Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2011 October (2011) (136): 182–191. https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00047 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon V…

  • Design e crime

    Open AccessHal FosterARTICLEARS (São Paulo2011Cited by: 1

    Neste artigo, Hal Foster nos narra o que ele chama da "vingança do capitalismo contra o pós-modernismo" por intermédio do design. Partindo do Art Nouveau, que nos anos 2000 voltou à moda como objeto de exposições e estudos, ele compara este estilo ao design total de nossos dias, tomando como exemplo principal o designer Bruce Mau. Do fordismo ao consumismo, as modulações que levaram à expansão de um tipo de design em detrimento da subjetividade s…

  • Rem Koolhaas: From Manhattan to the city of exacerbated difference

    Hal FosterCHAPTERGeographies Of Modernism2010