Bad New Days

What Does Art Still Do When Everything is Breaking?

A Reflective Review of Hal Foster’s Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency

By Yishan Li Liu

There is a quiet violence in Hal Foster’s Bad New Days—not in tone, but in thesis. Art, once a mirror of aesthetic autonomy or spiritual ideal, is now called upon to operate as a diagnostic

instrument in an era of fracture. No longer a sanctuary, it becomes a stethoscope pressed against

the chest of history. Published in 2015, Foster’s collection of essays explores what art can still

mean, or more precisely, what it must now do, under the pressure of terrorism, ecological

collapse, financial predation, and political corrosion.

It is not an easy book. It doesn’t aim to be. Dense with references, unapologetically Western in its

scope, and sharpened by the intellectual traditions of Marxism and psychoanalysis, Bad New

Days speaks with the vocabulary of October, the journal Foster helped shape. But buried beneath

the critical apparatus is a single persistent question: in this world of emergency, how can art

refuse both numbness and spectacle?

Foster offers four tentative answers, framed as strategies: archival art, which digs through

documents and debris to rebuild suppressed histories (as in the work of Walid Raad); mimetic

exacerbation, which pushes the logic of violence to absurd visibility (Mike Kelley comes to

mind); precarious aesthetics, where fragility becomes form (Thomas Hirschhorn, for instance);

and direct political engagement, where art steps off the pedestal into protest. These are not

movements or schools. They are survival reflexes.What drew me in, however, was not just the classification, but the implicit emotional terrain

behind each. Archival art, to me, feels like grief trying to find language. Mimetic exacerbation

reads like trauma mimicking its abuser. Precarity is not just formal—it is personal. And direct

engagement carries both urgency and exhaustion. These aren’t just strategies; they’re symptoms.

They remind me of the sentence I once wrote in my own journal: “I feel like I am drawing with

the ink of anxiety.” In this light, Foster’s book does not simply dissect art; it touches something

raw in how art is lived.

Reading Bad New Days while completing my graduate studies in illustration and motion design, I

often found myself asking: Am I, too, responding to crisis without naming it? My projects are

saturated with myth, baroque detail, and haunted symbols—Joan of Arc’s silhouette, Godiva’s

breath, a falling fig or a bleeding pomegranate. They look ornate, even decadent. But they are, in

essence, about rupture. Like Foster’s artists, I am also engaged in a visual reconstruction of

something already broken. Not history, perhaps, but memory. Not politics, directly, but psychic

pain.

Foster’s notion of “archival art” resonated especially deeply. As someone who grew up with the

soft violence of silence—domestic hierarchy, inherited shame, and the aesthetics of

suppression—I often find myself collecting emotional fragments from childhood and smuggling

them into my work. A single scarf pattern might contain the architecture of my grandparents’

living room; a motion graphic might mimic the rhythm of an old Beijing lullaby or the texture of

a tiled school floor. These are not just motifs. They are my version of archive. My visual memory

refuses disappearance.

That said, Foster’s own archive has its limits. The book focuses overwhelmingly on Euro

American artists—Raad, Kelley, Hirschhorn, and others—without offering meaningful inclusion

of Global South or East Asian voices. This is more than a blind spot. It shapes the theoretical lens

of the book in a way that feels historically partial. As a Chinese-born artist living and working in

the U.S., I found myself frustrated that the strategies Foster describes are so thoroughly rooted in

Western genealogies of resistance. Where are the voices of Asian precarity? What about artists

who operate under censorship not just symbolic, but literal?As a Chinese-born creator living in America, I cannot help but feel a kind of estrangement—not

from the strategies Foster discusses, but from the soil in which they are rooted. The tradition of

resistance he outlines blooms in the ruins of Western liberal democracies, fueled by a language of

exposure, rupture, and deliberate obscenity. But what about those artists whose silence was not a

strategy, but a necessity? Where, then, are the fragile voices from Asia, where vulnerability is not

always a gesture of empowerment but often the only form survival permits? I think of Zhang

Peili, whose video work "30x30" locks the viewer into repetitive futility, a man smashing a mirror

only to reassemble it again and again, an echo of lives disassembled and rebuilt under ideology’s

heavy hand. I think of Song Dong, whose installation of his mother’s lifelong belongings in

“Waste Not” felt less like art and more like a ritual, a desperate attempt to archive absence itself.

Or He Chengyao, who stripped on the Great Wall—not for shock but for lineage, memory, the

skin carrying her mother’s madness like a watermark. These artists do not “resist” so much as

they persist, quietly, under the texture of banality, in rooms where the air itself remembers what

cannot be said aloud.

Despite this, Bad New Days gave me a way to frame a question I had long been circling in my

own visual essays and nonfiction writing: how does one make meaning after rupture? In the

essays I’ve written for WRIT713 this quarter, I found myself returning to themes Foster names

obliquely—fragility, mimicry, reconstruction. But I also bring a more autobiographical lens.

Where Foster quotes Benjamin and Adorno, I reach for childhood dreams, family meals, and the

way soup spills from a Xiaolongbao like memory that refused to stay buried.

For example, Foster sees “precarious aesthetics” as an artistic embrace of vulnerability—unstable

materials, chaotic layouts, ephemeral forms. In my life, precariousness was not a theory. It was

the way I learned to speak quietly when my father raised his voice, the way I internalized silence

as a shield. There is a deep emotional resonance between Foster’s aesthetic categories and the

psychological experience of those who were raised inside systems that prize discipline over

tenderness.And then the pandemic came—like fog seeping into a room one had thought sealed. The old

languages fractured; so did the promises of control, safety, rationality. In this shaken world, I

wonder how Foster might consider the aesthetic of fragility reborn—not as critique, but as

confession. In the aftermath, artists like Wu Tsang choreographed bodies that float in water,

suspended between breath and drowning. Cao Fei’s dystopian reveries became less metaphorical,

more documentary. And when Jes Fan plants hormone-grown pearls into flesh, it no longer

shocks, but soothes—an alchemical gesture in an age of invisible threats. Fragility, post-COVID,

became less about exposure and more about endurance, the kind that weaves itself into the

routines of masked faces and unsent funerals, into the quiet of virtual classrooms and the

loneliness of digital touch. Art didn’t roar. It ached, lingered, and nested in the soft parts of our

lives, asking not to be understood but witnessed.

At times, Foster seems to wish art would save the world—or at least agitate it. But the book ends

with less of a call to arms than a quiet mourning. He offers no grand solution, no manifesto. Just

a typology. Some critics see this as a weakness, a “so what” conclusion. I see it as something more

honest. In a time of endless emergency, perhaps the work of art is not to resolve, but to remain—

witnessing, recording, refusing oblivion.

In the end, I don’t read Bad New Days as a book about art. I read it as a book about attention.

Attention as resistance. Attention as care. In a world screaming for productivity, speed, and

surface charm, to still believe that form can hold feeling, that image can carry critique, that

fragility is worth documenting—this, to me, is what makes the book matter.

Art won’t save us. But it might help us remember what it meant to feel.