Culture Now: Hal Foster

American art theorist Hal Foster is in conversation with Professor Mignon Nixon, discussing his new book Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (Verso, 2015). His new work 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.

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. A co-editor of October magazine and books, he is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic, and the author of Design and Crime, Recodings, The Return of the Real, Compulsive Beauty and The Art-Architecture Complex.

Mignon Nixon is the Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She is the author of Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (MIT Press/October Books, 2005) and the editor of the Eva Hesse October File(MIT Press/October Files, 2002). She is a co-editor of October magazine (New York).