Harold Foss "Hal" Foster (born August 13, 1955) is an American art critic and historian. He was educated at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997. In 1998 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Foster's criticism focuses on the role of the avant-garde within postmodernism. In 1983, he edited The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, a groundbreaking text in postmodernism. In Recodings (1985), he promoted a vision of postmodernism that simultaneously engaged its avant-garde history and commented on contemporary society. In The Return of the Real (1996), he proposed a model of historical recurrence of the avant-garde in which each cycle would improve upon the inevitable failures of previous cycles. He views his roles as critic and historian of art as complementary rather than mutually opposed.

Early life and education

Foster was born on August 13, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. His father was a partner in the law firm of Foster, Pepper & Shefelman. He attended Lakeside School in Seattle, where Microsoft founder Bill Gates was a classmate.

He graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1977 with a senior thesis examining the English poets Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill. In 1979 he completed a Master of Arts in English at Columbia University and a PhD in art history from the City University of New York in 1990, with a dissertation on Surrealism supervised by Rosalind Krauss.

In 1982, a friend from Lakeside School founded Bay Press to publish The Mink's Cry, a children's book written by Foster. In 1997 he joined the faculty of his undergraduate alma mater, Princeton University, in the Department of Art and Archaeology. He chaired the Department of Art and Archaeology from 2005 to 2009. In September 2011 he was appointed to the search committee to find a new dean for Princeton's School of Architecture. He is a faculty fellow of Wilson College.

Foster received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998. In 2010 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing by the Clark Art Institute. In 2013–14 he was appointed practitioner in residence at Camberwell College of Arts in London.

Criticism

thumb|right|Foster interviewing [[Robert Longo in 2017]]

In his introduction to The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), Foster described a distinction between complicity with and resistance to capitalism within postmodernism. The book included contributions by Jean Baudrillard, Douglas Crimp, Kenneth Frampton, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Edward Saïd, and Gregory Ulmer.

In Recodings 1985, Foster focused on the role of the avant-garde within postmodernism. He advocated a postmodernism that engages in both a continuation of its historical roots in the avant-garde and contemporary social and political critique, in opposition to what he saw as a "pluralistic" impulse to abandon the avant-garde in favor of more aesthetically traditional and commercially viable modes. He promoted artists he saw as exemplifying this vision, among them Dara Birnbaum, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Martha Rosler, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Foster favored expansion of the scope of postmodernist art from galleries and museums to a broader class of public locations and from painting and sculpture to other media. He saw postmodernism's acknowledgment of differences in viewers' backgrounds and lack of deference to expertise as important contributions to the avant-garde. (1974) – that the neo-avant-garde largely represented a repetition of the projects and achievements of the historical avant-garde, and therefore it was a failure. Foster's model was based on a notion of "deferred action" inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud. He conceded the failure of the initial avant-garde wave (which included such figures as Marcel Duchamp) but argued that future waves could redeem earlier ones by incorporating through historical reference those aspects that had not been comprehended the first time around. Gordon Hughes compares this theory with Jean-François Lyotard's.

Foster views his roles as art critic and art historian as complementary rather than mutually opposed, in accordance with his adherence to postmodernism.

Bibliography (selection)

Books

  • Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, 1985. Bay Press.
  • Compulsive Beauty, 1995. MIT Press.
  • The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, 1996. MIT Press.
  • Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes), 2002. 2nd. ed, 2011. Verso Books.
  • Art Since 1900: Modernism, Anti-Modernism, Postmodernism, 2005. With Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh. Thames & Hudson.
  • Pop (Themes & Movements), 2006. With Mark Francis. Phaidon Press.
  • Prosthetic Gods, 2006. MIT Press.
  • The Art-Architecture Complex, 2011. Verso Books.
  • The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha, 2011. Princeton University Press.
  • Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, 2015. Verso Books.
  • What Comes after Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle, 2020. Verso Books.
  • Brutal Aesthetics, 2020. Princeton University Press.
  • Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics, 2025. MIT Press.

References

  • Princeton Faculty: Hal Foster
  • The MIT Press: Hal Foster