Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency

"Start not with the good old days, but with the bad new ones."

In Bad New Days, Hal Foster examines the major transformation art and criticism have undergone in the last twenty-five years, in light of Bertolt Brecht's advice.

Looking at the works of artists working in different media such as Cindy Sherman, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Isa Genzken, with the help of writings by thinkers from different "schools of thought" such as Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Foster tries to understand the global "emergency" created by neoliberalism and the war on terror from within art, and offers us four "conceptual tools": the abject, the archive, mimesis, and precarity.

Bad New Days is a courageous book that gathers the answers contemporary art and criticism have and have not given to the volatile and murky reality of today's world and opens them up for discussion with new questions.

"Foster is one of those few art historians who, with his measured style, can reach a wide readership." Guardian

Hal Foster is the Townsend Martin Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and an editor of October magazine.

(From the Promotional Bulletin)