Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf [ INSTANT ]

“Reinventing the Medium” became foundational for:

Krauss's post-medium condition is, in many ways, a direct response to the crisis that Greenberg's own logic created. By pushing the idea of medium specificity to its extreme—to the monochrome canvas and the readymade—Greenberg's followers had painted themselves into a corner. Krauss's essay is a way out: a "looking back," as she puts it, at the road that led to this impasse, in order to find a new path forward.

To this day, remains a cornerstone of contemporary art theory. It shapes how critics, curators, and scholars analyze work in an era of constant media upheaval. Krauss's central questions—"What is a medium?" and "How do artists create meaning through specific technical supports?"—are more relevant now than ever in a world of AI-generated art, digital photography, and NFTs. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

: You can purchase and download a PDF directly from the Critical Inquiry website on the University of Chicago Press Journals platform.

However, time has vindicated Krauss. In the 2020s, as NFT art and generative AI flood the market, her concept of the “technical support” is more urgent than ever. AI art, for example, does not have a medium in the Greenbergian sense; but Krauss would ask: What is the technical support of a diffusion model? (The latent space? The prompt interface? The training data’s bias?). To this day, remains a cornerstone of contemporary

: However, starting in the 1960s, artists began to deliberately challenge and dismantle this idea. Conceptual art and other contemporary practices "jettisoned the specific medium in order to juxtapose image and written text in the same work". This experimentation led Krauss to define a "post-medium condition"—the abandonment of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the primary source of artistic significance. For Krauss, this "spells the end of serious art" if not critically confronted.

The first path traces how photography was transformed from an "aesthetic object" into a "theoretical object". This shift was driven by post-structuralist thinkers like , who built upon Walter Benjamin's earlier insights into mechanical reproduction. They used photography not just to create beautiful images, but to critique social trends and the very nature of representation. This intellectual elevation of photography, however, came at a cost: it made the medium self-conscious, framing it within an ongoing theoretical debate about its own meaning and purpose. Benjamin, for instance, saw photography as a tool for analysis, a quality Krauss argues was fully realized in later theory. : You can purchase and download a PDF

The essay’s most generative contribution is its emphasis on medium as a problem rather than a category. Rather than asking “Is this painting?” we ask: what networks—material, technological, economic, discursive—make this object legible as a painting? This approach opens analysis to interdisciplinary practices (video, installation, conceptual art) and to media that are procedural or relational rather than object-based.

Krauss borrows the term “post-medium condition” from philosopher Stanley Cavell. However, she clarifies that this condition does mean the end of media. Rather, it signals the breakdown of traditional, a priori media (e.g., painting, sculpture) and opens the possibility for artists to invent new, specific media on a case-by-case basis.