Hal Foster's "Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics"

Listen to this episode from LARB Radio Hour on Spotify. Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by the art critic and historian Hal Foster to speak about his latest book, Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics. A collection of essays that brings together over three decades of Foster’s work, the book exhibits a rigorous philosophical and political engagement with a celebrated group of critics and artists who span the 1960s to the present. Foster digs deep into the work of Pop masters, Minimalists, and the Pictures Generation, as well as contemporary artists, always splaying open the vein of his critique to make it resonant beyond the confines of the art world, and in broader conversation with history and culture. In addition to writers like TJ Clark and Rosalind Kraus, in Fail Better he also reflects on his own work as a critic, and the changes that have occurred in the landscape between his emergence in the 1980s and now.