Exit Interview: Benjamin Buchloh in conversation with Hal Foster [Paperback]

Two of the most important voices in art history discuss their intellectual foundations, the changing role of criticism, and the possibilities for artistic practice today.

In Exit Interview, the prominent art critics and historians Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh discuss their intellectual foundations and the projects they've worked on together, from October magazine to Art Since 1900. Through three engaging conversations, Foster engages Buchloh on his early influences and aspirations, his formative years in Berlin, London, and Dusseldorf, and his career in North America, while exploring the impact of other art historians and critics. Buchloh candidly addresses his successes, critical significance, and unexplored avenues in art history, providing a unique window into his motivations and experiences. With a powerful postface by Buchloh, Exit Interview builds from biography and anecdote to important reflection on one’s critical life as a whole.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.