Regular marked price: $30.00Discount Price: $19.80
Cost Savings: $10.20 (34%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 701.1809045
EAN num: 9780262561075
ISBN number: 0262561077
Label: The MIT Press
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 200
Printing Date: October 01, 1996
Publishing house: The MIT Press
Sale Popularity Level: 194437
Studio: The MIT Press
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
'The Return of the Real is one of the most cogent and theoretically self-aware readings of contemprary art I have seen.' -- Howard Singerman, Department of Art History, University of Virginia
In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s; Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real -- to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites: If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde; it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation -- and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
Granted, I'm not a Phd. in art history, so I can't claim how much of Foster's thinking is his own and how much he "borrows," but these essays, all interrelated and commenting on each other, carefully dissect postwar art, culture, politics, theory. I've read these essays four or five times and come away with a different insight on art each time. The definite highlight for me was the essay on traumatic realism (which ranges from the opposing simulacral and ideological readings of Warhol, to the tearing of the screen in Cindy Sherman, to the abject in art, to the opposing needs to deconstruct the subject and also reaffirm the subject in racial/sexual/cultural discourse.) Whew! It's a daring essay and is the rosetta stone, I think, of the entire book. His insight on the loss of critical distance (which accounts for why the Left and Right sound so much alike these days)needs to be heeded. Long live all the October writers!
Rated by buyers -
A quite interesting book about visual arts since '1960 written by the author and editor of "Anti-Aesthetics".@Especially the analysis of the recent relationship between Art and Anthropology/Ethnography is unique and suggestive.
Rated by buyers -
The book is full of productive suggestions for writing on contemporary visual arts. For a foreign reader, it provides a cogent overview of different moments in recent art; a fine sampling of commentary on theoretical writing, and valuable insight into current art criticism in the U.S. "The Return of the Real", meaning by that the Lacanian "Real", is a thought-provoking, stimulating idea that runs through the book and has refreshed my own critical work. I am indebted to this book.
Rated by buyers 
-
Foster is a good synthesizer on contemporary art, but ... when you read the footnotes, it feels like he's doin a lot of borrowing from other, less known work. And he never really discusses about the art he mentions, it's all allusions and side comments. And photos of pieces he never even mentions in the text. Still, it's about the best book-lentgh work I can think of on this, and some of the essays are killer.
Rated by buyers -
It's a little conplex but appliavle to many kinds of contemporary art theories.
Find other books like this one:
