Twenty years ago this summer, some friends and I decided to invent, or at least christen, a new artistic movement. We planned a conference on “Patheticism” and announced an eclectic lineage: Melville’s Bartleby, Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy”, lo-fi music and the slacker ethos. Postmodern irony was over, we declared, and henceforth only feeble, unfinished and frankly melancholic bouts of sincerity would do, artistically speaking. As Hal Foster notes in this deft, opinionated and slightly frustrating survey of the art of recent decades, academic critics in the 1990s lagged, as ever, behind developments among artists themselves. Late in the previous decade, many had already been “drawn not to the high of the simulacral image but to the lows of the depressive thing”. As a long-time editor at the theoretically austere journal October, Foster is well placed to describe a shift away from extolling the fakery of art and imagery, towards instead “a probing of the real” – and also to ask what might have been lost or occluded by this new “reality hunger” (to borrow a phrase from the essayist David Shields). Foster is rightly suspicious of the alleged “end of irony” that was bruited again after 9/11, even as he is eager to name and account for the ideas and methods that have succeeded winking self-reference, conscious sham and political quietism.

Bad New Days – the title is from Brecht – elaborates on five adjectives that best capture the art of the past quarter-century: “abject”, “archival”, “mimetic”, “precarious” and “post-critical”. (As Foster well knows, these are also cliches of critical and curatorial language.) The dark and willing slump into abjection is easily traced in the work of Cindy Sherman, whose early mocked-up “film stills” gave way to grotesque self-portraits with parodic old master props and eventually her unabashed embrace of glutinous body‑horror. Mike Kelley is also crucial to the abject turn, with his pitiful stuffed animals and his banner reading “Pants Shitter and Proud”. Paul McCarthy’s scatological films and installations complete the trio of what we might call the “high American abjection” of the 1990s.

With its origins in the same period, another class of reality has lurked in “archival art”, a broad term for artists as diverse as Tacita Dean and Thomas Hirschhorn, Jeremy Deller and Walid Raad – all of whom have embarked on research-rich forays into half-hidden cultural or political histories, presented in a variety of media: film, photography, sculpture of a sort and coolly arrayed documentary sources. Where conceptual artists in the 1970s had questioned the memorial or instructive ambitions of the archive, this later generation seemed seriously if not fully to believe in recovering evidence of the recent past: neglected artists and writers, dying or defunct technology, political events hidden by media memory. “Sometimes strained in effect,” Foster writes, “archival art is rarely cynical in intent.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tacita Dean’s Turbine Hall film, part of the 2011-12 Unilever Series at Tate Modern, London. Photograph: Sarah Lee/Guardian

Both of these trends are well known by now to a wide gallery-going public; less so the art Foster designates as “mimetic” and “precarious”. The first names a manic acceleration, chiefly in sculpture and installation, of the image and idea-dumps of contemporary media and politics. With his mortuary slabs, tortured limbs and molten materials, Robert Gober invents “a historical hell that combines the post-attack space of the World Trade Center with the bombsites of Iraq”. Such artists, however, still operate within the precincts of the gallery. “Precarious” art – with all that is implied of economic and social precarity – is more apt to turn up in Amsterdam’s red-light district, or a North African quarter of Avignon, where Hirschhorn has erected some of his ramshackle “monuments” to figures he admires: Spinoza, Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze. There is a democratic, pedagogic impulse behind such works – though Foster is not quite convinced by the “shaky analogy between an open artwork and an inclusive society”.

Which brings us to “post-critical”, which is seemingly our present condition, and to Foster’s related coda on performance art and audience involvement. “Collaboration is the answer,” says the uber-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, “but what is the question?” It might be this: where has the authority to decide or pronounce on works of art gone, with the apparent decline of the journalistic or academic critic? The tin-eared term “criticality” is heard everywhere in the art world, as if the spectacle could celebrate itself and analyse, even subvert, itself in the same instant. That is a consoling fantasy for many museums, and maybe even some artists; but criticism proper requires distance, detachment, a certain heartless reminder that we are not all on the same side, not all of the time.

As readers of his essays and reviews will know, Foster is one of those rare art theorists whose measured prose can engage a wider readership, cutting through the philosophical inflationism that afflicts much of the higher gossip among art critics. (Recent darlings of this tendency include Alain Badiou, Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, lately supplanted by a host of lesser new materialists and thing theorists.) But Bad New Days is also, one senses, an expression of unease about where Foster’s own critical authority might derive from today. Not, it seems, from much close description or analysis of specific artworks. His terms are all borrowed from the lexicon by which artists and curators justify their work, and so in a way he describes a set of ambitions – to inclusivity, democracy, “activation” of a supposedly passive viewer – and not achievements. That is an essential task as far as it goes, but it leaves untouched the question of how a critic today, following the demise of high theory, is meant to break out of the circle of endless art world conversations and test, or attest to, the things themselves.

• Brian Dillon’s The Great Explosion is published by Penguin. To order Bad New Days for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.