The Return of the Real: the Avant-Garde at the End of the Century

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 the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.