This book is full of contradictions, paradoxes and ambiguous oppositions, starting with its title, which suggests at once the uncivilized and the cultured, the destructive and the creative. Originally a series of lectures delivered in lofty circumstances (the 2018 A.W Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.), the subject of these chapters is the act of art making taken to its base level. The broad question throughout concerns what it means to be human, which is to say to create, in dehumanizing, destructive times. Following an introduction, each of five chapters explores the work of a single figure for whom art offers a means of cultural survival, analyzing them in relation to one another and in light of a range of contemporary theorists.
Linking Foster’s chapters is Walter Benjamin’s concept of “positive barbarism,” articulated in 1933 in the lead-up to World War II...