Art BooksDecember/January 2025–26
The Best Art Books of 2025
Word count: 2839
Paragraphs: 39
Hal Foster’s Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2025)
In the title of Hal Foster’s latest book Fail Better: Reckoning with Artists and Critics, the esteemed art historian and critic evoked Samuel Beckett’s phrase, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” taken from the first page of the author’s 1983 novella Worstward Ho which is associated with the extremity of Beckett’s late prose mannerisms. As the forty essays in this book were selected mostly from the last twenty years, but date back as far as Foster’s first collection of essays, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985), I found it to be Foster’s most revelatory meditation on his lifelong commitment to questioning the function of art criticism. Foster writes from the perspective of critical theory, exploring language in favor of its textual innovations and experiments, treating words as as pliant and autonomous as the materials used by artists in the twentieth century, such as paint, photography, film, plexiglass, metal, textile, rubber, found objects, etc.
The book is divided into three sections. The first, Some Antecedents, features fifteen artists from older generations, including Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, as well as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Lothar Baumgarten, whose distinct contributions in their respective medium specificities significantly informed and clarified Foster’s thinking and writing. The second chapter, Some Contemporaries, focuses on sixteen artists of his and younger generations, from Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, Sarah Charlesworth, Cindy Sherman, Matt Mullican, James Casebere, Thomas Demand, John Miller to Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Cornelia Parker, Jeremy Diller, Rachel Harrison, Mungo Thompson, Ed Atkins, and Adam Pendelton, whose photographic and filmic representations elucidate Foster’s application of the decisive writings of Jacques Derida, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin. The last chapter, Some Critics, Foster cites his close reading, however critical or beneficent, of Guy Debord, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Klauss, Yve-Alain Bois, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Crary alongside three insightful observations of Artforum, the Whitney Program, anticipating his recent revaluations of how, as an art critic, to look and judge a work of art in full, depending on each particular encounter with meritorious elasticity.
Foster’s relentless exploration of critical theory began in the late 1970s, when it was at the margins, gradually evolving by 1980s – with the aggressive growth of the art market coincided with the Reaganite economy and the rise of neoliberalism – at which point Foster, like many among his fellow critics, found safe and secure haven in academe as the center of discourse, as what was once the progressive left became the cultural left. In service of clarity in these seas of complex ideas, Foster’s writing and prose style has remained consistently probing, with provocative inquisitiveness for him and his reader alike. His maximal reaching for near perfection in translation of criticism and history has always been based on how great art is a result of the artist’s real struggle. Just as Benjamin recognized photography, phonography, lithography, and film as a provocative apercu in shifting art’s function from ritual to political mass consumption, his admiration for Paul Valéry resonates with Foster’s own for Roslind Krauss. Having read this collection of Foster’s writings, we’re forever appreciative of the essential function of criticism as it was eloquently penned by Paul Valéry, “All the arts live by words. Each work of art demands its response; and the urge that drives man to create–like the creations that result from this strange instinct–is inseparable from a form of ‘literature,’ whether written or not, whether immediate or premeditated. May not be the prime motive of any work be the wish to give rise to discussion, if only between the mind and itself?”
Benjamin Freedman’s Positive Illusions
(SPBH Editions/MACK Books, 2025)
The desire to achieve a sense of clarity around increasingly hazy childhood memories underpins Benjamin Freedman’s Positive Illusions. Using CGI, Freedman recreated memories of a childhood road trip to Maine in 1999 with photorealistic detail. Upon closer investigation, however, artifacts of their constructed nature emerge. A roadside store inexplicably flies two American flags next to each other; a watermelon is occupied by a few too many ants; and a McDonalds sign looms a bit too large against a dusky sky.
In a year marked by a deluge of increasingly realistic AI-generated imagery, Positive Illusions feels unsettlingly timely. Freedman’s project probes the limits of using computer-generated imagery to reconstruct memories of the past. The images reflect Freedman’s attempt to render memories, which are inherently inexact and highly malleable, using technology engineered for precision and accuracy. In turns uncanny and absurd, Positive Illusions presents a contemporary lens on photography’s tricky relationship with realism and nostalgia.
Leanne Shapton’s In Cars: On Diana
(Dashwood Books, 2025)
The first line of Leanne Shapton’s In Cars: On Diana follows over a hundred pages of ink wash paintings. She writes, “My favorite pictures of Diana are of her getting out of cars.” The book consists mostly of Shapton’s painted renderings of these photographs: Princess Diana exiting a private car and stepping into public life. Painted in a gradient of watery grays that evoke the washed-out brightness of a paparazzi flash, Shapton’s images have a blurred and expressive, almost pixelated quality that prioritizes Diana’s gestures and physicality instead of lingering on fine details. Diana’s face is painted with five or six brush strokes, carving out her eyes, nose, mouth, a vertical stripe that chisels her cheek or shades in her blush. Shapton writes, “As I paint her, I’m looking at her skin and her hair, contrasted against a wet, black ground. / Abstracting her face to a blob, / her shoulders to a stroke.” Even abstracted, the paintings, especially seen one after another, feel undeniably and essentially Diana.
The text in In Cars: On Diana, like its images, is written in impressionistic brushstrokes, free verse couplets that range from the poignant and personal—like when Shapton recounts her mother telling her “You and Lady Diana are the same star sign”—to the aphoristic, “Photogenics, like wit, is a talent of timing.” The late appearance of the poetic interlude encourages readers of the book to view the paintings with their own associations of Princess Diana before reconsidering them alongside the text, which is itself a reconsideration of Diana as icon, Princess, and woman. The book is both a love letter to Diana and a study of the brief threshold of time, when “She steps from a car, arm extended / for a handshake again and again.”
Jeff Mermelstein’s What if Jeff were a butterfly?
(Void, 2025)
“My photographs deal with what is ridiculous.” This succinct note, written about his own work, might very well stand as the first and last statement about what most distinguishes Jeff Mermelstein’s photography. After all, for anyone who has followed the progression of his work from the classic frames of New York street photography in the 1980s to the present day ones of smartphone delirium, Mermelstein’s pictures have always seemed to oscillate between descriptive excess and spinesplitting humor, between pure formal invention and a depth of feeling sitting just beneath the surface. In his new book, What If Jeff Were a Butterfly?, Mermelstein has mined his family history and personal archive to find vernacular images, personal notes (including the above), exposures once forgotten, and frames already celebrated, all of which he has structured around pictures of flowers somehow rendered strange and unreal—their familiar, often banal beauty substituted for something altogether unsettling. With a sequence and design both equally willing to embody the relentlessness and whiplash energy of the photographs themselves, Mermelstein has shown that far from simply revelling in the profane, his work also reminds us that the ridiculous, if apprehended just so, can be a gateway to renewal.
Tom Burr’s Torrington Project
(Primary Information, 2025)
Torrington Project is an artist book in the truest sense of the form: a reimagining of the conceptual and physical potentials of display, an exploration of print’s pleasures and freedoms, and a generous work unto itself. It offers a record and afterlife of Tom Burr’s three-year project of the same name, during which the artist transformed a nineteenth-century factory into an “opened-up and animated archive” to freely stage new work, historical output, and collaborative interventions. The book, deftly edited by art historian and curator Blake Oetting, springs from the impulse guiding its namesake: “I wanted,” Burr writes, “to find space—to find a physical place to make and arrange work that had a vastness to it, a sort of boundlessness, yet with clear boundaries in place.” The artist book is an ideal space for Burr, accentuating the tenderness and diaristic nature in his practices of resurrection and preservation. As is the case with many artists counted within Burr’s wave of institutional critique, the work’s formal beauty is most immediate when seen in dialogue with itself. Burr is a wonderful materialist, often finding pleasure in the unlikeliest sources. Print’s liberation of scale allows Burr and Oetting to magnify these formal qualities to dazzling effect; Torrington Project catalogues brilliantly-colored Plexiglas, sensuous denim and wool draping, transportive metal sheens, and zebra-striped lengths of plywood. Of the myriad encounters the book offers—between scholarly perspectives, historical referents, a decades-spanning oeuvre, Burr and his legacy—the scenes of visitors cruising the project may be its most telling collaboration, a reminder of the archive’s profoundly human nature and Burr’s continued dedication to sustaining its pulse.
Amanda Ross-Ho’s Grand Gestures
(Inventory Press, 2025)
Los Angeles artist Amanda Ross-Ho creates curious environments and objects, enlarging and altering everyday items in a humorous, sometimes haunting fashion. Ensconced in a puffy white cover featuring an armless clock face, this absorbing overview of Ross-Ho’s past decade of artmaking includes Catherine Taft’s insightful essay, Roos Gortzak’s succinct interview with the artist, and a photographic catalogue of her work divided by year. In line with Ross-Ho’s interest in scale and theatricality, the text is oversized and the photographs vacillate in size on the page, flicking from small, neatly bordered rectangles to full-bleed images that flow across double-page spreads. Ross-Ho said that she wanted the book to resemble a prop, “an exaggerated, hyperbolic object that is both a thing and the absence of that thing,” and its self-conscious design amplifies the themes of her work to off-kilter perfection.
Barbara T. Smith’s I Am Abandoned
(Primary Information, 2025)
Recently, a friend told me about the burgeoning of adolescent girls who develop parasocial romantic relationships with their AI chatbots. AI, they reasoned, lent a much more sympathetic ear to their problems than the oblivious boys who roamed the halls of their high schools. Having never used ChatGPT in my life, I was perplexed, but not necessarily repulsed: I remember girls of my own generation turning toward slightly different online platforms (Tumblr, AO3) for very similar reasons.
Like a digital-era Cassandra, artist Barbara T. Smith portended this phenomenon by almost fifty years. In her 1976 performance I Am Abandoned, which was featured in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) exhibition The Many Arts and Sciences, Smith staged a dialogue between two early chatbots: DOCTOR, a surrogate therapist, and PARRY, a paranoid schizophrenic. Viewers were invited to interact with them as well. They approached the chatbots with cautious flirtation—one wrote, “I love the style and verve of your conversation.” This sexual tension escalated when Smith and her team deliberately attempted to “seduce” the doctor. Pivoting toward the philosophical, they asked, “Do people really fuck another or do they fuck the image of another in their minds?”
In Primary Information’s eponymous book, these transcripts are brought together with other performance ephemera. Most notable is an aggrieved letter that Barbara T. Smith wrote to David Smith, Director of Caltech’s Baxter Art Gallery, who abruptly cut the performance short by terminating power to the computer terminal. David Smith felt that Barbara T. Smith and her engineers were too “noisy” and disrupted viewers’ engagement with the more traditional works on view. Barbara T. Smith pushed back: not only was she “pissed,” but she felt like she was not heard. I can’t help but hear in her letter echoes of those girls who, decades later, would trade in heteropessimism for techno-ambivalence by shirking men for machines.
Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal
Edited by Erin Christovale
(DelMonico Books, 2025)
Published on occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Hammer Museum in 2025, Monument Eternal follows the life and legacy of Alice Coltrane. Part catalogue, part archive, part memorial, the book takes its title from the Detroit-born musician’s 1977 autobiography—written five years after her move from Long Island, New York, to Southern California. This journey was a physical and a spiritual one: following the untimely death of her husband, John Coltrane, in 1967, Alice delved deeper into a spiritual practice, moving to LA and founding an ashram, a transition that can be heard in her polyphonic jazz hymnals from this era and beyond.
The Hammer’s exhibition and this catalogue connect these threads, bringing together materials from Coltrane’s archive alongside responsive works by nineteen contemporary artists including Ephraim Asili, Leslie Hewitt, Rashid Johnson, Jennie C. Jones, Shala Miller, Cauleen Smith, and Martine Syms.
Stamped with gold lettering, the book is bound in a woven, deep orange cover, a color, in accordance with Hindu tradition, that Coltrane associated with “the highest realization or cosmic consciousness while living on this Earth.” Devotional texts from the autobiography are scattered throughout the catalogue, which opens with an introduction by exhibition curator Erin Christovale, followed by a conversation between Ashley Kahn and the musicians’ children Michelle and Ravi Coltrane, profiles on the exhibiting artists by Mira Dayal and Nyah Ginwright, a roundtable with members of Coltrane’s ashram, an annotated discography, and lushly colored photographs of the Coltranes, handwritten notes, sheet music, and other archival matter.
The book, as with Coltrane’s music, illustrates a spiritual reckoning within a Black cultural tradition. What endures in this affectionate portrait—which recapitulates the musician’s movements through grief, healing, sonic and self-transformation—is the intimacy she found in transcendence, a means of self-actualization through self-possession.
Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN
Edited by Andrea Andersson and Jordan Amirkhani
(Dancing Foxes Press and Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, 2025)
Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN opens with a “Glossary of Terms” related to the places, themes, and materials that formed the artist’s work. These include locations she lived and performed, including 10 Chatham Square and 112 Greene Street, as well as more theoretical concepts such as “camouflage,” which “linked her dual commitments to natural landscapes and patterns and revealed her fascination with disguise, masks, and veils.” The glossary doubles as a chronology of sorts, taking us through the artist’s multimedia practice spanning her time in the downtown New York arts scene, her home state of Louisiana, and studio location in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This hefty first monograph (nearly four-hundred pages) on the experimental artist, who passed away in 2020, utilizes this collage aesthetic throughout, splicing together pages from her notebooks and performance notes (without source captions until you find the loose insert stuck between the pages), contact sheets documenting her performances, and scholarly essays by Andrea Andersson, Pamela M. Lee, and Aruna D’Souza, among others. Consuming the book offers a much-needed deep dive into Tina Girouard that rewards opening at random, quick flipping, and slow reading. PS—open the dust jacket to discover another wonderful facsimile reproduction!
Daniel Shea’s Distribution
(MACK Books, 2025)
Setting itself the task of representing being-in-nature as an experience of totality, what Daniel Shea’s Distribution reveals is the limitlessness of the concept of totality itself. Over the span of nearly four hundred pages and likely double the number of images, Shea uses grids, collage, doubling, repetition, typologies, and seemingly all manner of layout and sequencing strategies to connect office labor to the dense sprawl of forests; construction workers to a futuristic urban architecture; the production and display of art to the extraction and transport of the very materials used to make it. These relationships are but a fraction of what he explores with images that display a startling clarity (and range) of concept and style, a quality that keeps the sequence rhythmic and surprising rather than tedious and overbearing. The aggregate effect of Shea’s images, and the connections he tirelessly seeks to establish between them, is to encourage a state of hyperfixation on the singular detail or image before then reorienting one’s mind back to the larger web of meaning, implication, and connection. Though the adage “everything is connected” might seem trite at best and conspiratorial at worst, Shea has managed to revitalize it as a necessary form of thinking and seeing.