What Comes After Farce

(Hardback)

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If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd How to out-dada President Ubu And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same What Comes After Farce comments on shifts in art, criticism, and fiction in the face of the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. A first section focuses on the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, paranoia, and kitsch. A second reviews the neoliberal makeover of art institutions during the same period. Finally, a third section surveys transformations in media as reflected in recent art, film, and fiction. Among the phenomena explored here are machine vision (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface),operational images (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information so pervasive in our everyday lives.

Reviews

Praise for The First Pop Age:

"Foster's book offers the most sustained demonstration to date of the once contested belief that, far from merely reproducing their source materials, Pop paintings reinvent them. . . . Foster shines here. . . . His great pages on $he (1958-61 . . .) are unmatched in their grasp of tabular painting." -- Anne Wagner * London Review of Books *
Praise for The First Pop Age:

"Foster digs deep into the work of five pop painters: Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha, paying particular attention to the formal qualities and often complex processes they used to create their paintings. This marks a shift from traditional readings of pop, which privilege subject matter over form. . . . Revolutionary. . . . Foster expertly leads us through the intricacies of one of art history's most popular movements." -- Anny Shaw * Art Newspaper *
Praise for The First Pop Age:

"Anyone seeking a crisp argument for the importance of contemporary art history should welcome the introduction of Hal Foster's latest book, The First Pop Age..[Foster's] set of claims, briskly laid out, offers a model for what art history might now aim to achieve..[The First Pop Age] is the definitive book on Pop and subjectivity. It is a book we have needed for some time. It is only a bonus, then, that The First Pop Ageis such a pleasure to read. Foster's voice is lively and bright; one has the feeling of listening to a series of captivating scholarly talks, ideas tumbling out as if effortlessly. The compact volume is simply designed but lushly illustrated, a perfect size for toting and dipping into, one essay at a time..The First Pop Ageis a virtuosic summation of thoughts Foster has been working on for years, and cumulatively it offers some of art history's most piercing characterizations of recent capitalist subjectivity..[T]his book is indispensable. We will not soon find a better or more convincing statement of the ways in which popular culture has fashioned a new subject" -- Joshua Shannon * Art Journal *
Praise for The First Pop Age:

"[Foster] brilliantly weaves a history of five Pop artists, including Andy Warhol, to detail his proposition that Pop Art, as much as it came as a reaction to the pressures of modernity, was centrally concerned with the role of the image in contemporary culture." -- Joel Kuennen * ArtSlant *
Praise for The First Pop Age:

"The First Pop Agepresents a fresh and highly engaging take on one of the most worked-over movements in the history of art. . . . Any book by Foster, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, is something of an event in art history circles and The First Pop Ageis no exception. It is lavishly illustrated throughout." * Cassone Magazine *
"Drawing on historical and theoretical contexts, this volume explores how these artists (Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha) exploited new subjects and media in the context of traditional art forms. Richly illustrated with numerous color reproductions, the book also reveals how the work of these key figures evidenced an ambiguous attitude toward mass culture and high art." * Choice *
Praise for The First Pop Age:


"Copiously illustrated, the book is full of sharp insights into Pop social contexts as well as the art itself. And it reminds us why the style takes its name from 'popular.'" -- Dan Bischoff * Newark Star-Ledger *
Praise for The First Pop Age:

"Hal Foster's The First Pop Agemakes the Pop Artists of years gone by seem not only much more serious than ever, but also much more seriously relevant to our image-confused modern consciousness than ever." -- Bob Duggan
What Comes After Farce confirms what many have known for a long time: Hal Foster is indisputably the most important cultural critic writing in English today. No one else consistently offers such nuanced and cogent analyses of the tangled trajectories of the arts and media in this era of globalized financial capitalism. At the same time, few come close to Foster's discerning familiarity with the work of the most venturesome artists, novelists, filmmakers, and architects or to his critical understanding of the difficulties and challenges now facing them in our current state of emergency. -- Jonathan Crary
What Comes After Farce confirms what many have known for a long time: Hal Foster is indisputably the most important cultural critic writing in English today. No one else consistently offers such nuanced and cogent analyses of the tangled trajectories of the arts and media in this era of globalized financial capitalism. At the same time, few come close to Foster's discerning familiarity with the work of the most venturesome artists, novelists, filmmakers, and architects or to his critical understanding of the difficulties and challenges now facing them in our current state of emergency. -- Jonathan Crary
These essays, mostly on art (and culture and politics and violence and technology) read as one seamless and disturbing account of a catastrophic historical epoch: our own. Hal Foster offers no solace but instead his deft and trenchant wisdom on how we got here. * Rachel Kushner *
Every word cuts to the quick in this extraordinary book. Foster shows that true criticism must be swift and surgical, but it must also hurt. He casts his relentless and unflinching gaze on the crises of our time, from new fundamentalisms to alternative facts, from cultural imperialism to perpetual war. And yet these essays do not pose the twenty-first century as a cycle of tragedy and farce, doomed to repeat itself, but as a threshold-through which art can, and perhaps must, take us * Michelle Kuo *
What Comes After Farce confirms what many have known for a long time: Hal Foster is indisputably the most important cultural critic writing in English today. No one else consistently offers such nuanced and cogent analyses of the tangled trajectories of the arts and media in this era of globalized financial capitalism. At the same time, few come close to Foster's discerning familiarity with the work of the most venturesome artists, novelists, filmmakers, and architects or to his critical understanding of the difficulties and challenges now facing them in our current state of emergency. -- Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7
These essays, mostly on art (and culture and politics and violence and technology), read as one seamless and disturbing account of a catastrophic historical epoch: our own. Hal Foster offers no solace but instead his deft and trenchant wisdom on how we got here. -- Rachel Kushner
Illuminating, theoretically informed criticism of contemporary art. -- Kevin Brazil * art-agenda *
The rapid pace of Foster's prose captures the frenzied historical moment he is exploring, and his reluctance to offer simple answers acknowledges that multiple possibilities for reshaping our culture are currently ranged against each other. ... [this] lively and eloquent book convinces us that provocative artistic interventions remain possible. -- Oliver Eagleton * Guardian *
Foster traces how artists have responded to the political situation, while also asking how art criticism should respond to artworks and, through them, the broader moment ... The title [What Comes After Farce] is apt, not only because it invokes a great problem facing the left-how to imagine a future amid this mess-but also because it reflects the interrogative quality of the book's texts. -- Erika Balsom * Art in America *
The clarity of his prose is satisfying in itself ... While I was reading What Comes After Farce I felt that I was in the hands of one of the most skillful critics at work today. -- Barry Schwabsky * The Nation *
Foster's various texts move smartly and broadly across spheres ranging from sculpture and painting to cinema and literature, but most consistently he choreographs a dance between art and the larger culture that is its cradle. The articulation of one always imprints the other. Time and again in this respect, Foster is a pleasure to read for his sweeping statements that are still earned in their matter-of-factness, as when he makes short work of the contemporary art world's spiraling expansion in tandem with shifting economic structures. -- Tim Griffin * Artforum *
Magisterial ... [Foster possesses] a breathtaking erudition that he wears lightly. -- PopMatters * Vince Carducci *

Author Bio

Hal Foster is the author of numerous books, including The Art-Architecture Complex, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, and, with Richard Serra, Conversations about Sculpture. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he delivered the 2018 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington. He teaches at Princeton University, co-edits the journal October, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books.