“MANET/DEGAS,” the fall blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, begins with an unabashed, double-barreled bang: Édouard Manet’s last great self-portrait, paired up alongside one of Edgar Degas’s first. The juxtaposition provides a thrilling object lesson in the stolid compare-and-contrast curatorial methodology that defines the exhibition, but if it’s meant to show the two artists on an equal footing, it doesn’t stage a fair fight.
Patricia Treib’s pictorial language displays a deep understanding of the grammar of ornament and offers an idiosyncratic take on the process of abstraction.
This week, the editors pair two pieces by Hal Foster: his 2012 essay on Artforum’s early years and a new appraisal of The Anti-Aesthetic at forty.“The notion of postmodernism was once a great stimulant to art and thought,” Hal Foster writes in Artforum’s September issue. “Today, it feels like another anti-aphrodisiac of the just past.” The critic’s reflections on the intellectual hothouse that produced The Anti-Aesthetic edited in 1983 by Foster at the tender age of twenty-eight make for rewarding reading alongside his cogent account of the preceding period, now enshrined in the canon of fervid