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The Return of the Real: The Avante-Garde at the End of the Century Paperback – October 1, 1996

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Hal Foster (Author)
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Hal Foster (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 9 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 299 pages
  • Publisher: The MIT Press; 3rd Edition edition (October 1, 1996)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0262561077
  • ISBN-13: 978-0262561075
  • Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.6 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #403,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsHow can this be anything but five stars!
By A Customer on July 26, 2000
Format: Paperback
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!
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5.0 out of 5 starsVery productive reading
By A Customer on November 24, 1999
Format: Paperback
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.
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5.0 out of 5 starsAn Essential Guidebook to Postwar/Contemporary Visual Theory
By Shana Mason on October 16, 2015
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
This book was instrumental during my research in graduate school on the nature of contemporary aesthetics and parsing dialogues on contemporary visual art. I think of this as a guidebook: Foster's lucid, approachable tone to the art of looking at Art is invaluable to student, scholar, and art enthusiast. Art becomes grounded firmly in the present, and any reference or inference to the "past" is one invoked by nostalgia and context, almost entirely. Postwar theory didn't experience proper documentation until the mid to late 1980's, and Foster's text is essential within that corpus.
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5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars
By Martha on January 4, 2016
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Good read
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3.0 out of 5 starsinteresting essays, but ...
By A Customer on September 26, 1999
Format: Paperback
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.
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