This is a collection of critical essays of Hal Foster, a famous American critic and art historian on contemporary art. It has extensively and deeply explored various artistic phenomena and theoretical models. As a representative of the postmodern critics, Forster believes that the new avant-garde art is not a simple imitation or repetition of the old avant-garde art; postmodernism is not a simple breakthrough or break-up of modernism. On the contrary, there is a complicated dialectical relationship between the past and the present, a kind of delayed effect (the aftereffect in psychoanalysis). The first chapter of this book demonstrates the delayed effect of new avant-garde art on the old one. The second chapter immediately puts forward a contemporary art pedigree with minimalism and pop art at its core. The following chapters discuss the linguistic turn, the cynical reason, the expression of "reality" and the anthropological turn in the practice of contemporary art. This book applies frontier theories of literature, philosophy, and psychology to interpret the various bizarre phenomena in the art world, unfolding the complicated entanglement between the art of innovation and the theory of the 20th century. In particular, the first and fifth chapter of this book make a deep and insightful discussion on topics from Freud's theory of trauma, the theory of delayed effect, to the Three-Dimension theory of Lacan, and then to the “Abjection” theory of Kristeva, which are the classic texts of artistic interpretation based on psychoanalytic models.
