Exit Interview: Benjamin Buchloh in Conversation with Hal Foster

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.

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).