Hal Foster (art critic)

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Hal Foster, who is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, is an internationally renowned author of books on post-modernism in art.

Born in Seattle, the son of a partner in the distinguished law firm of Foster Pepper and Shefelman, Foster was educated at a private academy, Lakeside School, where one of his classmates was Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

He later studied at Princeton and took a PhD at CUNY before becoming an instructor at the Whitney Program – an offshoot of the Whitney Museum. His landmark 1983 edited book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture identified the end of the modern era and the arrival of postmodernism. Foster is a student of Rosalind E. Krauss and thus extends a lineage that from Clement Greenberg to Michael Fried to Krauss. Authors such as Jürgen Habermas, Kenneth Frampton, Fredric Jameson, Rosalind E. Krauss, Jean Baudrillard, Edward Said, Gregory Ulmer, Craig Owens, and Douglas Crimp took positions—often disparate—against what Foster would term the 'postmodernism of reaction.' In its stead, Foster and most of the authors would argue for a 'postmodernism of resistance.' His later book Recodings, first published in 1985 solidified his position as a critic of stature in contemporary art and architecture. In his 1996 Return of the Real, Foster returned to postmodernism once again, and in the 2002 Design and Crime turned his eye to the near-total penetration of design in contemporary life. For his dissertation, Foster explored surrealist art through the lens of psychoanalytic art theory. Foster would publish this research as Compulsive Beauty in 1993 and would return to the topic with Prosthetic Gods in 2004.

As a recent recipient of Guggenheim and CASVA fellowships, he continues to write regularly for the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, October (where he is also a co-editor), and the New Left Review.

His most recent publication is a book on Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism coauthored with three other distinguished historians of 20th-century art, Rosalind E. Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.