The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture

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Hal Foster

New Press, New York, 2002; originally published 1983, English

Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History

ISBN: 9780941920025

From the Publisher of the 2002 edition. A new edition of the seminal collection of late-20th-century cultural criticism. Named a Best Book of the Year by the Village Voice and considered a bible of contemporary cultural criticism. Since the early 1980s, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said consider the full range of postmodern cultural production, from the writing of John Cage, to Cindy Sherman’s film stills, to Barbara Kruger’s collages.

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Deborah Berke

On Deborah Berke’s Book List

This is a very serious collection of essays that had a huge impact on the way I think about the world and about art and architecture. Ken Frampton’s essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” is one every architect should be familiar with, but the value of this volume is also in the essays of Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson, among others.

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