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“... Biographies​ of artists often tie the art too directly to the life, as though dramatic experiences were iconographic keys that unlock the work once and for all. Early accounts of artists were modelled on the legends of heroes and saints, and even today they tend towards the epic in scope and hagiographic in tone. Magritte mostly avoids these traps; it is deeply researched, stylishly written and unusually insightful about its subject ...”

“... T.J.​ Clark begins If These Apples Should Fall with a restaging of his first encounter with Cézanne, when as a 15-year-old in 1958 he was amazed by a reproduction of The Basket of Apples: ‘I think I can retrieve the feeling even sixty years later.’ This is one version of ‘the present’ in his subtitle, the summoning of a then of Cézanne painting and Clark looking into a now of his writing and our reading ...”

“... Art​ history was shaken in the 1970s and 1980s, and the epicentre was 19th-century art. Emboldened by the resurgent Marxism and feminism of the 1960s, engaged scholars including T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other fields as well ...”

“... In Delirious New York (1978), his ‘retroactive manifesto’ for Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas published an old tinted postcard of the city skyline in the early 1930s. It presents the Empire State, Chrysler, and other landmark buildings of the time with a visionary twist – a dirigible is set to dock at the spire of the Empire State. It is an image of the 20th-century city as a spectacle of new tourism, to be sure, but also as a utopia of new spaces – people are free to circulate from the street, up through the tower, to the sky, and back down again ...”

“... When Hal Foster uses the word ‘first’ in the title of his confidently focused study, he means to start us thinking about Pop now and then. It is a reference to Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), which argued that modernism’s prewar optimism was over and done. ‘We have already entered the Second Machine Age,’ Banham declared, ‘and can look back on the First … as a period of the past ...”

“... salt will encounter, severally or federated, the critics Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss. This quartet have been working together since the 1970s, and are currently co-editors of the journal October. Founded in 1976 and subtitled ‘Art/Theory/Criticism/Politics’, October introduced a generation of academics to ...”

“... the capacity for autonomous form-creation that had traditionally been the province of sculpture. Hal Foster was one of the first openly to dispute Gehry’s coronation. ‘Is this designer of metallic museums and curvy concert halls, luxury houses and flashy corporate headquarters,’ he asked in the LRB (23 August 2001), ‘truly Our Greatest Living ...”

“... by Michael Polanyi, Paul Ricoeur, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Stephen Best, Toril Moi, Hal Foster, Namwali Serpell and others. Her current work is perhaps the liveliest and least plangent forum for questions about how to read and write criticism after theory. But read in isolation from this larger and longer conversation, it can look ...”

“... longer privileges the arts in relation to society or attempts to impose an aesthetic ideology. As Hal Foster observed (in a collection first published in 1983 as The Anti-Aesthetic and now, perhaps significantly, retitled Postmodern Culture), ‘the artifact is [now] likely to be treated less as a work in modernist terms – unique, symbolic, visionary ...”

“... So come delight in the city again, swap stories, argue politics, see a show, have a drink. Hal Foster New York If I had been there and seen it up close in New York or Washington, I, too, might cry out for revenge. But I have been there at other times: in Libya, when American warplanes punished people who were asleep and unarmed; in Iraq, when ...”

“... cemetery; from urban engineering, such as Calatrava’s railway station in Zurich or Norman Foster’s Stansted air terminal, to a sprinkling of housing developments, culminating in Bofill’s deliberately magnificent ensemble in Cergy-Pontoise and Leon Krier’s deliciously classical Atlantis; from a few individual dwellings (Gehry’s Schnabel ...”

“... ale, like the hapless Francis at the Boar’s Head Tavern, torn between glamorous Prince Hal, who is detaining him with idle chatter, and Poins, who is calling again and again for more drink. This is boys’ play, too, and Francis hovers, crying ‘Anon, anon, sir,’ as if, rather than meaning ‘soon’, ‘anon’ refers instead to himself, ‘the ...”

“... in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation – if not, to put it more plainly, outright imitation. It is, in fact, a virtuoso performance that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon, and his third book, Infinite Jest, may well be the ...”

“... gratifying that people die while watching it, round and round for ever, in an endless loop. David Foster Wallace always had trouble finishing his novels. And yet he put in this one a thought so absorbing and delightful that you could easily imagine yourself, like the rat in the experiment, pressing the lever over and over. ‘Thousands of times an hour,’ as ...”

“... Askar, who was brought up as a poor orphan, in the charge of a much more conservative uncle and a foster-mother, with severe Islamic educattion. Much of the book concerns Askar’s childhood, close to the female body of his foster-mother, conscious of her menstruations, her warmth and wetness. Nuruddin Farah’s novels have ...”