The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century

by Hal Foster

Book Overview

In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262561077
• ISBN13: 9780262561075
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.9" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

How can this be anything but five stars!

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!

excellent analysis ensured by rich Aesthetic knowledge

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.

Very productive reading

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.

helpful and interesting book

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

fascinating

Foster offers a very coherent discussion of contemporary art