{"product_id":"what-comes-after-farce-isbn-9781804295939","title":"What Comes After Farce?","description":"\u003cb\u003eSurveying the artistic and cultural scene in the era of Trump\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a world where truth is cast in doubt and shame has gone missing, what are artists and critics on the left to do? How to demystify a political order that laughs away its own contradictions? How to mock leaders who thrive on the absurd? And why, in any event, offer more outrage to a media economy that feeds on the same?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Such questions are grist to the mill of Hal Foster, who, in \u003ci\u003eWhat Comes after Farce?\u003c\/i\u003e, delves into recent developments in art, criticism, and fiction under the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. Concerned first with the cultural politics of emergency since 9\/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, conspiracy, and kitsch, he moves on to consider the neoliberal makeover of aesthetic forms and art institutions during the same period. A final section surveys signal transformations in art, film, and writing. Among the phenomena explored 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 that pervades our everyday lives.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e If all this sounds dire, it is. In many respects we look out on a world that has moved, not only politically but also technologically, beyond our control. Yet Foster also sees possibility in the current debacle: the possibility to pressure the cracks in this order, to turn emergency into change.\u003ci\u003ePreface\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eI. Terror and Transgression\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 1. Traumatic Trace\u003cbr\u003e 2. Bush Kitsch\u003cbr\u003e 3. Paranoid Style\u003cbr\u003e 4. Wild Things\u003cbr\u003e 5. Père Trump\u003cbr\u003e 6. Conspirators\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eII. Plutocracy and Display\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 7. Fetish Gods\u003cbr\u003e 8. Beautiful Breath\u003cbr\u003e 9. Human Strike\u003cbr\u003e 10. Exhibitionists\u003cbr\u003e 11. Gray Boxes\u003cbr\u003e 12. Underpainting\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eIII. Media and Fiction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 13. Player Piano\u003cbr\u003e 14. Robo Eye\u003cbr\u003e 15. Smashed Screens\u003cbr\u003e 16. Machine Images\u003cbr\u003e 17. Model Worlds\u003cbr\u003e 18. Real Fictions\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eNotes\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eIndex\u003c\/i\u003e“These essays, mostly on art (and culture and politics and violence and technology) read as one seamless and disturbing account of a catastrophic historical epoch: our own. Hal Foster offers no solace but instead his deft and trenchant wisdom on how we got here.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Rachel Kushner\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Every word cuts to the quick in this extraordinary book. Foster shows that true criticism must be swift and surgical, but it must also hurt. He casts his relentless and unflinching gaze on the crises of our time, from new fundamentalisms to alternative facts, from cultural imperialism to perpetual war. And yet these essays do not pose the twenty-first century as a cycle of tragedy and farce, doomed to repeat itself, but as a threshold—through which art can, and perhaps must, take us.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Michelle Kuo\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eWhat Comes After Farce\u003c\/i\u003e confirms what many have known for a long time: Hal Foster is indisputably the most important cultural critic writing in English today.  No one else consistently offers such nuanced and cogent analyses of the tangled trajectories of the arts and media in this era of globalized financial capitalism. At the same time, few come close to Foster’s discerning familiarity with the work of the most venturesome artists, novelists, filmmakers, and architects or to his critical understanding of the difficulties and challenges now facing them in our current state of emergency.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Jonathan Crary, author of \u003ci\u003e24\/7\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Illuminating, theoretically informed criticism of contemporary art.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Kevin Brazil, \u003ci\u003eart-agenda\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “The rapid pace of Foster’s prose captures the frenzied historical moment he is exploring, and his reluctance to offer simple answers acknowledges that multiple possibilities for reshaping our culture are currently ranged against each other … [this] lively and eloquent book convinces us that provocative artistic interventions remain possible.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Oliver Eagleton, \u003ci\u003eGuardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Foster traces how artists have responded to the political situation, while also asking how art criticism should respond to artworks and, through them, the broader moment … The title is apt, not only because it invokes a great problem facing the left—how to imagine a future amid this mess—but also because it reflects the interrogative quality of the book’s texts.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Erika Balsom, \u003ci\u003eArt in America\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “The clarity of his prose is satisfying in itself … While I was reading \u003ci\u003eWhat Comes After Farce? \u003c\/i\u003eI felt that I was in the hands of one of the most skillful critics at work today.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Barry Schwabsky, \u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Foster’s various texts move smartly and broadly across spheres ranging from sculpture and painting to cinema and literature, but most consistently he choreographs a dance between art and the larger culture that is its cradle. The articulation of one always imprints the other. Time and again in this respect, Foster is a pleasure to read for his sweeping statements that are still earned in their matter-of-factness, as when he makes short work of the contemporary art world’s spiraling expansion in tandem with shifting economic structures.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Tim Griffin, \u003ci\u003eArtforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Magisterial … [Foster possesses] a breathtaking erudition that he wears lightly.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Vince Carducci, \u003ci\u003ePopMatters\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHal Foster\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of numerous books, including \u003ci\u003eThe Art-Architecture Complex\u003c\/i\u003e; \u003ci\u003eThe First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha\u003c\/i\u003e; \u003ci\u003eBad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency\u003c\/i\u003e; and, with Richard Serra, \u003ci\u003eConversations about Sculpture\u003c\/i\u003e. He teaches at Princeton University, co-edits the journal \u003ci\u003eOctober\u003c\/i\u003e, and contributes regularly to the \u003ci\u003eLondon Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Verso","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302953439461,"sku":"NP9781804295939","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781804295939.jpg?v=1767743807","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/what-comes-after-farce-isbn-9781804295939","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}