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The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century
The Return of the Real Art and Theory at the End of the Century Author:Hal Foster In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in... more » the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.
After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the realâto art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-gard, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situationâand what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.« less