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Prosthetic Gods.(Book review)
- Article from:
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The Art Bulletin
- Article date:
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March 1, 2006
- Author:
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Copyright informationCOPYRIGHT 2006 College Art Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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HAL FOSTER
Prosthetic Gods
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. 455 pp.; 15 color ills., 121 b/w. $35.00
Hal Foster has long pursued what might be called the psychohistorical analysis of twentieth-century art. Prosthetic Gods is both a retrospective and an extension of that project. Seven of its eight chapters rework essays that have appeared in journals or exhibition catalogs since 1991, and many of its themes, images, and passages are familiar from his last three books, but it also breaks important new ground.
Foster notes that Prosthetic Gods is a kind of "companion" (p. xiv) to Compulsive Beauty (1993), which applied Sigmund Freud's concepts of the uncanny ...