Krauss, a co-founder of October magazine and former critic for Artforum , disagreed. She did not mourn the medium; she sought to reinvent it.
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?). rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
Krauss offers no manifesto for cool digital tools. She offers something harder: a method. How do you look at a strange video installation and decide if it is lazy or revolutionary? You ask: What is its reinvented medium? What technical support does it activate? Krauss, a co-founder of October magazine and former
Her target was Clement Greenberg’s formalism. Greenberg argued that each medium should purify itself (painting should be only flatness and pigment). Krauss argued the opposite: The post-medium condition allows an artist to reinvent a medium from scratch for each project. The single most important concept in “Reinventing the Medium” is the “technical support.” In the 2020s, as NFT art and generative
For students, scholars, and artists searching for the , the quest is not merely about finding a file. It is about accessing a master key to understanding postmodernism, post-media art, and the very structure of visual perception. This article unpacks the essay’s dense arguments, explains why it remains essential reading, and provides legitimate pathways to locating the PDF. The Context: Why “Reinventing the Medium” Was Necessary To understand Krauss’s 1999 essay, one must look back to her 1986 essay, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde.” There, she dismantled the myth of the Romantic genius. By the late 1990s, the art world was obsessed with “interactivity” and “dematerialization.” Critics argued that digital art had no medium—only code and screens.
Krauss saw this as a lazy fallacy. She believed that simply declaring the death of the medium was an act of theoretical bankruptcy. Instead, she proposed that the medium was not a physical substance (canvas, stone, bronze) but a —a set of conventions, memories, and technical supports that an artist activates.
In the landscape of 20th-century art criticism, few essays have shifted the tectonic plates of theory as decisively as Rosalind Krauss’s “Reinventing the Medium.” Published in 1999 in Critical Inquiry (Vol. 25, No. 2), this seminal text arrived at a moment of digital anxiety. Artists were abandoning traditional painting and sculpture for video, installation, and the internet, leading many to declare the “death of the medium.”