In these diatribes on the marketing of culture and the branding of identity, the development of spectacle-architecture and the rise of global cities, Hal Foster surveys our new political economy of design.

Written in a lively style, Design and Crime explores the historical relations of modern art and modern museum, the conceptual vicissitudes of art history and visual studies, the recent travails of art criticism, and the double aftermath of modernism and postmodernism in an attempt to illuminate the conditions for critical culture in the present.