The Return of the Real

Hal Foster's essays have time and again defined the point where theoretical imagination converges with urgent questions in the practice of art, and he offers a guiding intelligence for anyone who wants to know why contemporary art matters in the wider debates about the shape and direction of American culture.

Thomas Crow, Robert Lehman Professor of History of Art, Yale University

The compelling analyses in The Return of the Real make clear that Hal Foster is one of the few contemporary critics who cinsistently asks and thinks through the most probing questions about the turbulent intersection of late 20th Century art, cultural theory, and global capitalism, and who keenly knows that the answers to them can never be reassuring or fashionable affirmations but rather new and disquieting questions.

Jonathan Crary, Columbia University

As the twentieth century lurches to its end, the rhetoric of 'posts' has been increasingly supplanted by an awareness of uncanny repeition. No one has more skillfully mapped the resulting spatial displacements and temporal heterogeneities than Hal Foster. Lively and accessible in style, theoretically astute and politically engaged, The Return of the Real is a model of cultural criticism at its most incisive.

Martin Jay, Professor, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley

Hal foster has written a well-argued account of contemporary art practices and issues that is unique in its perceptive assessment of the very recent past. Foster has the capacity - rare in historians - achieving a critical and crucial distance from that work which affects him most immediately. An invaluable book for educators and artists alike.

Silvia Kolbowski, Artist

The Return of the Real is one of the most cogent and theoretically self-aware readings of contemprary art I have seen.

Howard Singerman, Department of Art History, University of Virginia