Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

Hal Foster

"Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics”
[Response Jeff Dolven]

Tuesday, April 8, 2025 @5pm ET

N107 (School of Architecture)

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. In these 40 texts, Foster reviews artists from Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns to Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha; considers contemporaries from Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman to Jeremy Deller and Adam Pendleton; and traces the development of criticism since the early 1960s, with essays on such influential figures as Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss and institutions like Artforum magazine and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. 
Taking his title from Beckett—“try again, fail again, fail better”—Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his “reckonings” he turns his own long history of criticism to account, and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades.
 

Hal Foster is the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of What Comes After Farce? and Brutal Aesthetics, among other books. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he coedits October, and writes regularly for The London Review of Books.

Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance. He has written three books of criticism, Scenes of Instruction (Chicago 2007), Senses of Style (Chicago 2018), and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet 2017), as well as essays on a variety of subjects, including Renaissance metrics, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare’s reading, Fairfield Porter, and player pianos. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals in the US and the UK and in a volume, Speculative Music (Sarabande 2013). He is also an editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine, and was the founding director of Princeton’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) and acting chair of the English Department in 2018-19.
 

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