The Foster that emerges from this conjuncture is perhaps more jaded than the one we’ve come to know.
Meanwhile, formal aesthetic practices that seemed progressive during the 1990s have since been co-opted by a rapacious commercial art world. And critique itself threatens to redouble the “nihilism of the neoliberal order” by engendering a state of cold detachment that reflects our alienated society. Mockery has become a gift to “leaders who thrive on the absurd”. The “hermeneutics of suspicion” – a critical method that reveals the tension and instability behind seemingly stable constructs – is useless against a political establishment that flaunts its own contradictions. He claimed that such art could do two things its utopian forerunner couldn’t: expose the contradictions of capitalism via rigorous critique, and puncture its ideological armour through playful yet penetrating mockery.įoster’s latest collection of essays, however, spotlights the impotence of these techniques in the age of Trump. Against this grim appraisal, Foster insisted on the political importance of such postmodernists as Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger, who enacted a form of subversion more subtle and effective than the “abstract and anarchistic” avant garde. In their place, a financialised society had filled the galleries with glorified consumer products: kitschy, toothless and historically amnesiac.
Avant garde experiments that mounted a frontal attack on bourgeois culture, such as dada and surrealism, were passé. Amid the new regime of union-busting deregulation instituted by Thatcher and Reagan, the assumption in Foster’s Marxist academic milieu was that contemporary art had shed its radical convictions. D uring the mid-1980s, when Hal Foster established himself as one of the leading art critics in the anglophone world, many were flummoxed by his optimism.
0 kommentar(er)
