Common Reads Library Marketing
0 0
Download high-resolution image

Fail Better

Reckonings with Artists and Critics

Author Hal Foster
Ebook (EPUB)
The MIT Press
On sale Feb 25, 2025 | 448 Pages | 9780262383189
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

See Additional Formats
View on Edelweiss
From the distinguished art critic and historian, vital essays on key artists and critics, revealing how they redefined art and criticism over the last six decades.

“Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present,” Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. “By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past.” In Fail Better, Foster, an art critic and historian whose influential work spans disciplines and decades, brings this peripatetic perspective to contemporary art, art criticism, art history, and his own work over the past 50 years.

In these 40 texts, Foster reviews artists from Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns to Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha; considers contemporaries from Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman to Jeremy Deller and Adam Pendleton; and traces the development of criticism since the early 1960s, with essays on such influential figures as Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss and institutions like Artforum magazine and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Taking his title from Beckett—“try again, fail again, fail better”—Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his “reckonings” he turns his own long history of criticism to account, and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades.
Hal Foster is the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of What Comes After Farce? and Brutal Aesthetics, among other books. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he coedits October, and writes regularly for The London Review of Books.
Hal Foster View titles by Hal Foster
Introduction
I Some Antecedents
1. A Painter of Pop Life (Richard Hamilton)
2. Watchman and Spy (Jasper Johns)
3. Every Sidewalk is a Ray Gun Beach (Claes Oldenburg)
4. Andy Paperbag (Andy Warhol)
5. Object Lessons (Donald Judd)
6. Blank Magic (Dan Flavin)
7. To Support (Richard Serra)
8. Serial and Fused (Eva Hesse)
9. The Underside of Things (Bruce Nauman)
10. Cultural Studies (Dan Graham)
11. In a Glass Darkly (Gerhard Richter)
12. The Culture of the Raster (Sigmar Polke)
13. Evening in America (Ed Ruscha)
14. Blasted Allegories (John Baldessari)
15. The Writing on the Wall (Lothar Baumgarten)
Some Contemporaries
16. Oblique Looking (Louise Lawler)
17. Direct Address (Barbara Kruger)
18. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic (Sarah Charlesworth)
19. I Could Be Me (Cindy Sherman)
20. A Passenger in My Own Psyche (Matt Mullican)
21. Imaginary Tableaux (James Casebere)
22. Third Nature (Thomas Demand)
23. Perverse Pantomime (John Miller)
24. Inexplicable Things (Robert Gober)
25. Philosophical Objects (Charles Ray)
26. Lost and Found (Cornelia Parker)
27. Civil Wars and Pop Utopias (Jeremy Deller)
28. Happy Days (Rachel Harrison)
29. How Not To (Mungo Thomson)
30. Media Corpsing (Ed Atkins)
31. The Artist as Anthologist (Adam Pendleton)
Some Critics
32. A Certain Practice of Life (Guy Debord)
33. Radical Style (Susan Sontag)
34. Hyperbolic Criticism (Artforum)
35. Made for Cutting (Rosalind Krauss)
36. An Inventory of Encounters (Yve-Alain Bois)
37. Antinomic Modernism (T. J. Clark)
38. The Ruins of Spectacle (Jonathan Crary)
39. Interdependent Study (the Whitney Program)
40. The Anti-Aesthetic Then and Now
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

About

From the distinguished art critic and historian, vital essays on key artists and critics, revealing how they redefined art and criticism over the last six decades.

“Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present,” Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. “By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past.” In Fail Better, Foster, an art critic and historian whose influential work spans disciplines and decades, brings this peripatetic perspective to contemporary art, art criticism, art history, and his own work over the past 50 years.

In these 40 texts, Foster reviews artists from Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns to Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha; considers contemporaries from Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman to Jeremy Deller and Adam Pendleton; and traces the development of criticism since the early 1960s, with essays on such influential figures as Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss and institutions like Artforum magazine and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Taking his title from Beckett—“try again, fail again, fail better”—Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his “reckonings” he turns his own long history of criticism to account, and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades.

Author

Hal Foster is the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of What Comes After Farce? and Brutal Aesthetics, among other books. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he coedits October, and writes regularly for The London Review of Books.
Hal Foster View titles by Hal Foster

Table of Contents

Introduction
I Some Antecedents
1. A Painter of Pop Life (Richard Hamilton)
2. Watchman and Spy (Jasper Johns)
3. Every Sidewalk is a Ray Gun Beach (Claes Oldenburg)
4. Andy Paperbag (Andy Warhol)
5. Object Lessons (Donald Judd)
6. Blank Magic (Dan Flavin)
7. To Support (Richard Serra)
8. Serial and Fused (Eva Hesse)
9. The Underside of Things (Bruce Nauman)
10. Cultural Studies (Dan Graham)
11. In a Glass Darkly (Gerhard Richter)
12. The Culture of the Raster (Sigmar Polke)
13. Evening in America (Ed Ruscha)
14. Blasted Allegories (John Baldessari)
15. The Writing on the Wall (Lothar Baumgarten)
Some Contemporaries
16. Oblique Looking (Louise Lawler)
17. Direct Address (Barbara Kruger)
18. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic (Sarah Charlesworth)
19. I Could Be Me (Cindy Sherman)
20. A Passenger in My Own Psyche (Matt Mullican)
21. Imaginary Tableaux (James Casebere)
22. Third Nature (Thomas Demand)
23. Perverse Pantomime (John Miller)
24. Inexplicable Things (Robert Gober)
25. Philosophical Objects (Charles Ray)
26. Lost and Found (Cornelia Parker)
27. Civil Wars and Pop Utopias (Jeremy Deller)
28. Happy Days (Rachel Harrison)
29. How Not To (Mungo Thomson)
30. Media Corpsing (Ed Atkins)
31. The Artist as Anthologist (Adam Pendleton)
Some Critics
32. A Certain Practice of Life (Guy Debord)
33. Radical Style (Susan Sontag)
34. Hyperbolic Criticism (Artforum)
35. Made for Cutting (Rosalind Krauss)
36. An Inventory of Encounters (Yve-Alain Bois)
37. Antinomic Modernism (T. J. Clark)
38. The Ruins of Spectacle (Jonathan Crary)
39. Interdependent Study (the Whitney Program)
40. The Anti-Aesthetic Then and Now
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Additional formats

Other Books by this Author

Penguin Random House Library Marketing

© 2025 Penguin Random House

Back to Top
0
    • 0
    Wish List (0)
    • More Websites from
      Penguin Random House
    • Common Reads
    • Library Marketing