Exit Interview

Included in the New York Times’s Best Art Books of 2024

“Some scholars want a party when they reach the end of their careers; others prefer a wake. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, among the most penetrating and uncompromising of postwar art historians, says goodbye to criticism in this revealing book-length interview with his colleague Hal Foster, which surveys his six-decade career in Germany and the United States — and shifts from youthful dreams of aesthetic resistance to 21st-century fatalism. Now that well-moneyed institutions set the boundaries of art, Buchloh says, “there’s no longer any role for the critic. What critic is qualified to criticize stocks?” But on this point his own life proves him wrong; in laying bare the ideology of the art industry, Buchloh has at least put into words what we are missing.”
—The New York Times, Arts

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, an art historian and critic, served as the Andrew W. Mellon Research Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Harvard University through 2021. He is the author of Gerhard Richter- Painting After the Subject of History (2022); Formalism and Historicity- Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (2015); and Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry- Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. He was co-curator of the Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum/Met Breuer, New York in 2020. In 2007 Buchloh received the Golden Lion for Contemporary Art History and Criticism at the Venice Biennale.

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He was a founding editor of Zone Magazine and Zone Books and writes regularly for October (which he coedits), Artforum, and The London Review of Books. Recent books include What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (2020); Conversations about Sculpture, with Richard Serra (2018); Bad New Days- Art, Criticism, Emergency (2015); and The First Pop Age- Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (2012).

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