In these diatribes on the marketing of culture and the branding of identity, the development of spectacle-architecture and the rise of global cities, Hal Foster surveys our new political economy of design. Written in a lively style, Design and Crime explores the historical relations of modern art and modern museum, the conceptual vicissitudes of art history and visual studies, the recent travails of art criticism, and the double aftermath of modernism and postmodernism in an attem...

Bad New Days 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.Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Ranci�re, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated t...

From the distinguished art critic and historian, vital essays on key artists and critics, revealing how they redefined art and criticism over the last six decades.“Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present,” Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. “By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past.” In Fail Better, Foster, an art critic and historian whose influential work span...

Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. He identifies a "global style" of architecture-as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano-analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies.More than any art, today's global style conveys both the dreams and delusions of modernity. Foster demonstrates that a study of the "art-architecture co...

How artists created an aesthetic of “positive barbarism” in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombIn Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster e...

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same? What Comes After Farce? comm...

“A fascinating, thoughtful, and thoroughly enjoyable exploration of a major dimension of human experience.”— Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind WorksA maverick scientist reveals the inconsistent and often paradoxical ways humans think, feel, and behave towards animals in this engaging, informative, and though-provoking book, now newly revised.Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat is a highly entertaining and illuminat...

An Unsung Cat explores the life and music of jazz saxophonist, Warne Marsh. Safford Chamberlain follows the artist from his start in youth bands like the Hollywood Canteen Kids and The Teen-Agers through his studies under Lennie Tristano, his brilliant playing of the 1950s, his disappearance from public view in the 1960s, his re-emergence in the 1970s, and his belated recognition in the 1980s as one of the finest tenor players of the post-World War II era. Through interviews with the Marsh...

From an historian who advised on the BBC's Wolf Hall, an erudite romp through the intimate details of life in Tudor England.

In the spirit of Evicted, Bait and Switch, and The Big Short, a shocking, heart-wrenching investigation into America’s housing crisis and the modern-day robber barons who are making a fortune off the backs of the disenfranchised working and middle class—among them, Donald Trump and his inner circle.Two years before the housing market collapsed in 2008, Donald Trump looked forward to a crash: “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me...

Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names still resonate across thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended the Roman republic, their lives pose a question that haunts us still: how to safeguard a republic from the flaws of its leaders.This edition of Plutarch delivers a fresh translation of notable clarity, explanatory notes, and ample historical context.

In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique pe...