Main entry:

Foster, Hal, author.

Title & Author:

Fail better : reckonings with artists and critics / Hal Foster.

Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2025]

Description:

xiii, 434 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 25 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Some antecedents. A painter of pop life (Richard Hamilton) -- Watchman and spy (Jasper Johns) -- Every sidewalk is a ray gun beach (Claes Oldenburg) -- Andy Paperbag (Andy Warhol) -- Object lessons (Donald Judd) -- Blank magic (Dan Flavin) -- To support (Richard Serra) -- Serial and fused (Eva Hesse) -- The underside of things (Bruce Nauman) -- Cultural studies (Dan Graham) -- In a glass darkly (Gerhard Richter) -- The culture of the raster (Sigmar Polke) -- Evening in America (Ed Ruscha) -- Blasted allegories (John Baldessari) -- The writing on the wall (Lothar Baumgarten) -- Some contemporaries. Oblique looking (Louise Lawler) -- Direct address (Barbara Kruger) -- The sex appeal of the inorganic (Sarah Charlesworth) -- I could be me (Cindy Sherman) -- A passenger in my own psyche (Matt Mullican) -- Imaginary tableaux (James Casebere) -- Third nature (Thomas Demand) -- Perverse pantomime (John Miller) -- Inexplicable things (Robert Gober) -- Philosophical objects (Charles Ray) -- Lost and found (Cornelia Parker) -- Civil wars and pop utopias (Jeremy Deller) -- Happy days (Rachel Harrison) -- How not to (Mungo Thompson) -- Media corpsing (Ed Atkins) -- The artist as anthologist (Adam Pendleton) -- Some critics. A certain practice of life (Guy Debord) -- Radical style (Susan Sontag) -- Hyperbolic criticism (Artforum) -- Made for cutting (Rosalind Krauss) -- An inventory of encounters (Yve-Alain Bois) -- Antinomic modernism (T. J. Clark) -- The ruins of spectacle (Jonathan Crary) -- Interdependent study (the Whitney Program) -- The Anti-aesthetic then and now.

Summary:

"A collection of Hal Foster's writing as a critic, since 1993"-- Provided by publisher.
"'Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present,' Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. 'By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past.' In Fail Better, Foster, an art critic and historian whose influential work spans disciplines and decades, brings this peripatetic perspective to contemporary art, art criticism, art history, and his own work over the past 50 years. In these 40 texts, Foster reviews artists from Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns to Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha; considers contemporaries from Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman to Jeremy Deller and Adam Pendleton; and traces the development of criticism since the early 1960s, with essays on such influential figures as Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss and institutions like Artforum magazine and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Taking his title from Beckett - 'try again, fail again, fail better' - Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his 'reckonings' he turns his own long history of criticism to account, and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades." -- Publisher's description.

ISBN:

9780262552356 paperback
0262552353 paperback
electronic book
9780262383172
9780262383189

Subject:

Arts and society History 20th century.
Arts and society History 21st century.
Arts et société Histoire 20e siècle.
Arts et société Histoire 21e siècle.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 321082
Call No.: 321082
Copy: 1
Status: Available