“Anyone seeking a crisp argument for the importance of contemporary art history should welcome the introduction of Hal Foster’s latest book, The First Pop Age.… set of claims, briskly laid out, offers a model for what art history might now aim to achieve.… is the definitive book on Pop and subjectivity. Foster expertly leads us through the intricacies of one of art history's most popular movements.' Anny Shaw, This marks a shift from traditional readings of pop, which privilege subject matter over form. 'Foster digs deep into the work of five pop painters: Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha, paying particular attention to the formal qualities and often complex processes they used to create their paintings. ) are unmatched in their grasp of tabular painting.' Anne Wagner,

'Foster's book offers the most sustained demonstration to date of the once contested belief that, far from merely reproducing their source materials, Pop paintings reinvent them. Among the phenomena explored here are “machine vision” (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface),“operational images” (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information so pervasive in our everyday lives. Finally, a third section surveys transformations in media as reflected in recent art, film, and fiction. A second reviews the neoliberal makeover of art institutions during the same period.

A first section focuses on the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, paranoia, and kitsch. If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same? What Comes After Farce? comments on shifts in art, criticism, and fiction in the face of the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption.

What Comes After Farce by Hal Foster