Hal Foster Discusses His New Book with Alex Kitnick

What Comes After Farce? by Hal Foster (Published by Verso Books)

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.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foster was a founding editor of Zone Magazine and Books. He writes regularly for October (which he also co-edits), Artforum and The London Review of Books—and has authored many books, including Conversations About Sculpture with Richard Serra (Yale University Press, 2018) and Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (Verso, 2015). Brutal Aesthetics, his 2018 Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, will be published by Princeton University Press in fall 2020.

Alex Kitnick is an art historian and critic based in New York. He is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. A regular contributor to 4Columns, he organized the exhibition The Critic at Matthew Marks Gallery this past fall.