| Hal Foster (art Critic) |
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Information AboutHal Foster (art Critic) |
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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 and thus extends a lineage that from Clement Greenberg to Michael Fried to Krauss. Authors such as Jürgen Habermas, Kenneth Frampton, 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 . |
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