《Bad New Days》简介：

Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.

Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it.

Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”

《Bad New Days》摘录：

In 1933, as the Nazis came to power, the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch referred kitsch to an emergent bourgeoisie caught between contradictory values, an asceticism of work on the one hand and an exaltation of feeling on the other. As a compromiseformation, this early kind of kitsch tended toward a blend of prudery and prurience, with sentiment at once chastened and heightened (a representative instance is the painting of Arnold Böcklin). Broch was categorical about the disastrous effects of this kitsch: he called it “the evil in the value-system of art.” Clement Greenberg agreed. In another momentous year, 1939, he underscored its capitalist dimension. “A product of the industrial revolution,” his kitsch was an ersatz version of “genuine culture,” which the bourgeoisie, now dominant, so...