In Recodings (1985), he promoted a vision of postmodernism that simultaneously engaged its avant-garde history and commented on contemporary society.

in English from Princeton University in 1977 after completing a 106-page long senior thesis titled "Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill: Two Poets in a Tradition.

[2] He received his PhD in art history from the City University of New York in 1990, writing his dissertation on Surrealism under Rosalind Krauss.

[2][6] In 1982,[7] a friend from Lakeside School founded Bay Press to publish The Mink's Cry, a children's book written by Foster.

[9] In 1991, Foster left the Whitney[2] to join the faculty of Cornell University's Department of the History of Art.

[8] The book included contributions by Jean Baudrillard, Douglas Crimp, Kenneth Frampton, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Edward Saïd, and Gregory Ulmer.

He promoted artists he saw as exemplifying this vision, among them Dara Birnbaum, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Martha Rosler, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Foster favored expansion of the scope of postmodernist art from galleries and museums to a broader class of public locations and from painting and sculpture to other media.

He saw postmodernism's acknowledgment of differences in viewers' backgrounds and lack of deference to expertise as important contributions to the avant-garde.

In The Return of the Real (1996), taking as his model Karl Marx's reaction against G. W. F. Hegel, he sought to rebut Peter Bürger's assertion – which he made in Theory of the Avant-Garde[19] (1974) – that the neo-avant-garde largely represented a repetition of the projects and achievements of the historical avant-garde, and therefore it was a failure.

In a 1999 article in Social Text, Crimp rebutted Foster, criticizing his notion of the avant-garde and his treatment in The Return of the Real of sexual identity in Andy Warhol's work.