Customer Reviews

The Return of the Real: The Avante-Garde at the End of the Century

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Granted, I'm not a Phd. in art history, so I can't claim how much of Foster's thinking is his own and how much he "borrows," but these essays, all interrelated and commenting on each other, carefully dissect postwar art, culture, politics, theory. I've read these essays four or five times and come away with a different insight on art each time. The definite highlight for me was the essay on traumatic realism (which ranges from the opposing simulacral and ideological readings of Warhol, to the tearing of the screen in Cindy Sherman, to the abject in art, to the opposing needs to deconstruct the subject and also reaffirm the subject in racial/sexual/cultural discourse.) Whew! It's a daring essay and is the rosetta stone, I think, of the entire book. His insight on the loss of critical distance (which accounts for why the Left and Right sound so much alike these days)needs to be heeded. Long live all the October writers!

The book is full of productive suggestions for writing on contemporary visual arts. For a foreign reader, it provides a cogent overview of different moments in recent art; a fine sampling of commentary on theoretical writing, and valuable insight into current art criticism in the U.S. "The Return of the Real", meaning by that the Lacanian "Real", is a thought-provoking, stimulating idea that runs through the book and has refreshed my own critical work. I am indebted to this book.

Foster is a good synthesizer on contemporary art, but ... when you read the footnotes, it feels like he's doin a lot of borrowing from other, less known work. And he never really discusses about the art he mentions, it's all allusions and side comments. And photos of pieces he never even mentions in the text. Still, it's about the best book-lentgh work I can think of on this, and some of the essays are killer.

A quite interesting book about visual arts since '1960 written by the author and editor of "Anti-Aesthetics".�@Especially the analysis of the recent relationship between Art and Anthropology/Ethnography is unique and suggestive.

Foster offers a very coherent discussion of contemporary art

It's a little conplex but appliavle to many kinds of contemporary art theories.