Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics

by Hal Foster

For the past few decades Hal Foster's critical gaze has encompassed the increasingly complex machinery of the culture industry. His observations push the boundaries of cultural criticism to establish a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. Recodings has become the classic "primer in poststructuralist debate" (Village Voice). The essays present a constellation of concerns about the limits and myths of postmodernism, the uses and abuses of historicism, the connections of recent art and architecture with media spectacle and institutional power, and the transformations of the avant garde and of cultural politics generally.

Genres: Art, Art History, Essays, Theory, Nonfiction, Architecture

243 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Hal Foster is a Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University specializing in 20th century art.

Note: for the comic book artist, see Harold "Hal" Foster.

Reviews

[Peter Pinelli]

Against Pluralism is a revelation

[Tina]

haven't pulled this one down in awhile
but got me thinking about projections and spectacle before i could get into debord
used to carry it around with me
has so many notes in it, it's like my own annotation

[learnedHamster]

I read a bit too much of this book, and always in a scattered way, when I was in Berlin. Ever since, sometimes a fragment of text comes back to me, and I always wonder if it's from this book or something else. I don't know whether that is because of the book, or the wholly enclosed spacetime I was in whilst reading - do with this as you may.

[Alicia]

favorite essays: subversive signs and (post)modern polemics