The renowned American art historian and critic Hal Foster is coming to the National Museum to discuss the relevance of the avant-garde today.

In the 1970s the avant-garde, the formation that long held progressive art and progressive politics together, was declared dead. Its utopian aspiration was regarded with particular contempt, on the Left as well as the Right.

This talk will look back at the avant-garde to see what might be reclaimed from this apparent ruin fifty years later.

Recently artists have tapped the Dadaist dimension of this past for purposes of Left agitation, but transgression now seems to be the domain of the Right. Might it be time, in the face of political crisis and ecological disaster, to recover a Constructivist agenda, indeed to rehabilitate utopia as such?