Hal Foster's new book: Bad New Days

The title of Hal Foster’s new book Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency is drawn from an oft-quoted maxim of Bertolt Brecht’s: “Don’t start with the good old days, but the bad new ones.” Contending that the last 25 years have been a period of continuous social crisis—hence the “emergency” of his subtitle—Foster considers what role art and criticism play following the “full dominance of neoliberalism” that has emerged since 1989 and the suspension of the social contract after 9/11. At a moment when the most institutionally hostile practices have been readily embraced, and when art seems given over to ballooning market values, corporate sponsorship, and blockbuster spectacle, is it possible to maintain faith in the idea of an avant-garde—or, for that matter, in the value of critique? However dire the situation may be, Foster insists that the avant-garde is not over, but perhaps more necessary than ever—not in the sense of the heroic historical avant-garde of “radical innovation” or “transgression,” but an avant-garde that is “immanent in a caustic way,” one that “seeks to trace fractures that already exist within a given order, to pressure them further, even to activate them somehow.”....Continue Reading

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