Foster, Hal

Bio Sketch

Hal Foster is an American art critic and theorist (the Townsend Martin Professor at Princeton), a co-editor of October, and a leading voice on postmodernism, the avant-garde, and the politics of art. His essays on pluralism, spectacle, and "resistance vs. reaction" are central to Geoffrey's postmodernism & critique area.

Key Works

• Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985) — "Against Pluralism," "The Expressive Fallacy," "Contemporary Art and Spectacle," "(Post)Modern Polemics."
• The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (ed., 1983); The Return of the Real (1996).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Ideology
• Spectacle
• Critical Architecture
• Consumerism

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Foster is central to Geoffrey's postmodernism & critique and semiotics & representation areas: his "postmodernism of resistance vs. reaction," his account of art's "becoming-spectacle," and his critique of pluralism-as-conformism underpin the critical-vs-projective debate and the question of whether architectural images can resist or only reiterate capital.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics
• Phantasmagoria and the Architecture of the Contemporary City (Lahiji 2015) — Foster's reversal of Debord and his critique of Gehry's "decorated duck"
• The Everyday: Wandering, Wondering. Re-Positioning Architecture, Spectacle and Everyday Life