Introduction to “Blinded insights”. Hal Foster and the criticism of avant-garde primitivism

Abstract

The following text presents some concepts applied on the work of Hal Foster, American art critic and art historian, which has been translated to Portuguese only in some scattered texts and in a single whole book. Nowadays, Hal Foster is the chair holder of Art and Anthropology at Princeton University and co-editor of OCTOBER. This introduction is followed by the translation of "Blinded insights", which is one chapter of Prosthetic Gods, 2004, about the aesthetic relation of artists as Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee and Max Ernst with the Prinzhorn collection of mentally ill artists' work.