One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice – please join us for a presentation and discussion with author Hal Foster and fellow critic and scholar, Devin Fore.

Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.

Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben,l Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it.

Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”

Hal Foster is Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. A co-editor of October magazine and books, he is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic, and the author of many influential books, including Design and Crime, Recodings, The Return of the Real, Compulsive Beauty, The First Pop Age, and The Art-Architecture Complex. Devin Fore is Associate Professor of German at Princeton. He, too, is an editor at October magazine. Fore is the author of Realism After Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature. His new book, All the Graphs: Soviet Factography and the Emergence of Avant-Garde Documentary, is forthcoming from Chicago University Press.