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Hal Foster on The Anti-Aesthetic

Hal Foster on The Anti-Aesthetic

THE NOTION OF POSTMODERNISM was once a great stimulant to art and thought; today, it feels like another anti-aphrodisiac of the just past. In some ways, postmodernism seems more historical than modernism, reanimated as modernism is by questions of colonialism, diaspora, and globality. On the other hand, this untimeliness makes the present a good moment to look back at postmodernism, if only to measure our distance from it.The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which I edited, was published forty years ago; it was quickly followed by Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (

SIXTY YEARS AGO, in Artforum’s very first issue, our founding editor, Philip Leider, threw down the gauntlet for art’s autonomy. “Art and artists will flourish when an admiring public buys paintings because they love them; if the myth that buying art is a good investment (in the Wall Street sense) is perpetuated, the result can only be disaster for both.” I took his words—from a blistering review of two 1961 publications on art and money—as an early expression of the magazine’s ethos, which made speculation a constitutive exclusion. The keyword for me here was not myth or disaste...

In the original 1976 Homo Soit, an article called Gay Studies written by Dennis Altman speculated that “In a University as academically conservative as the…