Hal FosterFail Better
Reckonings with Artists and Critics
Hal Foster is the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of What Comes After Farce? and Brutal Aesthetics, among other books. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he coedits October, and writes regularly for The London Review of Books.
Introduction
I Some Antecedents
1. A Painter of Pop Life (Richard Hamilton)
2. Watchman and Spy (Jasper Johns)
3. Every Sidewalk is a Ray Gun Beach (Claes Oldenburg)
4. Andy Paperbag (Andy Warhol)
5. Object Lessons (Donald Judd)
6. Blank Magic (Dan Flavin)
7. To Support (Richard Serra)
8. Serial and Fused (Eva Hesse)
9. The Underside of Things (Bruce Nauman)
10. Cultural Studies (Dan Graham)
11. In a Glass Darkly (Gerhard Richter)
12. The Culture of the Raster (Sigmar Polke)
13. Evening in America (Ed Ruscha)
14. Blasted Allegories (John Baldessari)
15. The Writing on the Wall (Lothar Baumgarten)
Some Contemporaries
16. Oblique Looking (Louise Lawler)
17. Direct Address (Barbara Kruger)
18. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic (Sarah Charlesworth)
19. I Could Be Me (Cindy Sherman)
20. A Passenger in My Own Psyche (Matt Mullican)
21. Imaginary Tableaux (James Casebere)
22. Third Nature (Thomas Demand)
23. Perverse Pantomime (John Miller)
24. Inexplicable Things (Robert Gober)
25. Philosophical Objects (Charles Ray)
26. Lost and Found (Cornelia Parker)
27. Civil Wars and Pop Utopias (Jeremy Deller)
28. Happy Days (Rachel Harrison)
29. How Not To (Mungo Thomson)
30. Media Corpsing (Ed Atkins)
31. The Artist as Anthologist (Adam Pendleton)
Some Critics
32. A Certain Practice of Life (Guy Debord)
33. Radical Style (Susan Sontag)
34. Hyperbolic Criticism (Artforum)
35. Made for Cutting (Rosalind Krauss)
36. An Inventory of Encounters (Yve-Alain Bois)
37. Antinomic Modernism (T. J. Clark)
38. The Ruins of Spectacle (Jonathan Crary)
39. Interdependent Study (the Whitney Program)
40. The Anti-Aesthetic Then and Now
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
