Hal Foster (b. 1955, USA)
The Return of the Real, 1996

The MIT Press

“However subtle it may seem, this shift from a subject defined in terms of economic relation to one defined in terms of cultural identity is significant” (Foster 1996:173).

Foster is really good in guiding me in this uncanny maze of contemporary art with all of its activism, ideological colouring, identity politics and projects that at first sight do not register as art at all. I may not be sharing his views or expectations for social efficacy of art, but it helps to understand the underpinnings of the things I don’t understand, which is useful. Occasionally he even echoes my own thinking (or, perhaps, the other way round, if we would honour the chronology of thinking) – e.g. observing “the danger, for the artist as ethnographer, of ‘ideological patronage'” (ibid.).