Forum: Hal Foster - Utopia or Exctinction?

In the 1970s the avant-garde, the formation that long held progressive art and progressive politics together, was declared dead. Its utopian aspiration was regarded with particular contempt, on the Left as well as the Right.

This talk will look back at the avant-garde to see what might be reclaimed from this apparent ruin fifty years later.

Recently artists have tapped the Dadaist dimension of this past for purposes of Left agitation, but transgression now seems to be the domain of the Right. Might it be time, in the face of political crisis and ecological disaster, to recover a Constructivist agenda, indeed to rehabilitate utopia as such?

Hal Foster is the author of numerous books, including, mostly recently, Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics(MIT Press, 2025), What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (Verso, 2020), and Brutal Aesthetics(Princeton University Press, 2020), his 2018 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he teaches at Princeton University, co-edits the journal October, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books.

Forum

This lecture is part of Forum, a lecture series organised by the National Museum. Here, leading art historians, theorists and curators talk about key challenges in the museum field today and present critical perspectives on how art history is written—and what role museums play in society.

In 2026, Forum places particular emphasis on the complex relationship between art and politics.