Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf Jun 2026

Krauss highlights several key moves. First, she insists that medium is not a self-evident given but a contested field—artists and critics repeatedly “reinvent” media by exposing their conventions and limitations. Second, she maps how modernism attempted to purify media (the idea that painting should emphasize flatness, for example), and how postwar practices disrupted those purities through hybrid and anti-medium strategies. Third, she connects medium to institutional frameworks: museums, galleries, and critics help stabilize what a medium is by deciding how works are shown, talked about, and sold.

In her 1999 essay originally published in Critical Inquiry , renowned art theorist Rosalind Krauss addresses a crisis in contemporary art: the "post-medium condition". For decades, the art world followed the formalist doctrine of Clement Greenberg, who argued that each art form must stay within its "pure" material boundaries—painting should be about flatness, and sculpture about three-dimensionality.

This essay is not a eulogy for the old mediums, but a manifesto for their reinvention. For any serious student of art, it is essential reading. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

For the student or enthusiast ready to read the essay themselves, the following information will help locate the full text.

: Uses the slide projector and advertising formats as a reinvented medium. William Kentridge Krauss highlights several key moves

In her essay and subsequent work, Krauss highlights artists who effectively reinvent the medium, often using "obsolete" technology, drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s idea that the obsolete allows for new artistic potential.

—a state where traditional distinctions between artistic media like painting and sculpture have collapsed. Instead of viewing this collapse as a total loss, argues that artists can "reinvent" the medium by adopting a "technical support" This essay is not a eulogy for the

Krauss highlights several artists who successfully "invent" their own mediums: James Coleman: slide-tape projector