Exit Interview - by Benjamin H D Buchloh & Hal Foster (Paperback)

About the Book

"Exit Interview offers insight into the intellectual foundations and motivations of two of art history's most important critical voices, Hal Foster, Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archeology at Princeton, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, recently retired Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Harvard University. Over three conversations, Foster engages Buchloh on his childhood influences and aspirations; his time in Berlin communes, where he was close with Gudrun Ensslin and other members of the Red Army Faction; his experiences in London as an aspiring fiction writer; and his return to Germany in 1971 to work at art galleries, publish the short-lived but influential magazine Interfunktionen, and teach at the Dusseldorf Academy. Together they chart Buchloh's path from Europe to North America--first to Nova Scotia, then Los Angeles, and finally New York--and they discuss the important role of other art historians and critics like Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson. Foster and Buchloh delve into their successes and critical significance, as well as their oversights and omissions. Building on years of collaboration and friendship, Foster and Buchloh's compelling conversations have been edited, framed, and sequenced by the authors, building from biography and anecdote to important reflection on one's critical life as a whole"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

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).