Foster Hal. Bad New Days. Art, Criticism, Emergency

Verso, 2015. — 202 р. — ISBN 978-1-78478-145-3Contemporary art is so vast, so diverse, and, yes, so present as to frustrate any historical overview, and none is offered here. However, a story can be told about some art of the past twenty-five years, coherent notions do exist for this work, and it remains one task of criticism to articulate such terms as best it can.1 Part of the story told in this brief book turns on a recent move away from the primary assumptions of postmodernist art, in particular away from its privileging of the imagistic and the textual and toward a probing of the real and the historical. This shift was driven by motives intrinsic to art, to be sure, but it also speaks to
conditions extrinsic to it, often extreme ones: hence the appearance of “emergency” in my subtitle.