By reframing the medium not as a rigid material (like canvas or clay) but as a , Krauss offers a roadmap for maintaining the integrity, history, and radical potential of art in the 21st century. How to Locate and Study the Text
Published in 1999 in the journal Critical Inquiry (and later expanded in her book A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition ), Krauss’s essay arrived at a moment of cultural anxiety. The late 1990s witnessed the explosive rise of digital media, the internet, and globalization. The Death of Medium Specificity
Art risks becoming generic, commercialized, and devoid of formal rigor.
By the 1970s and 1980s, the explosion of installation art, conceptual art, performance, and video shattered these boundaries. Art entered what Krauss termed the . rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
It retains a relationship to past forms of expression, acting as a counterweight to the disposable nature of commercial culture. Case Studies: Benjamin and Broodthaers
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A medium defined not by a single material, but by a complex web of internal relationships and rules. By reframing the medium not as a rigid
Platforms like JSTOR, Project MUSE, or university library catalogs regularly host the essay, which was published in Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1999, Vol. 26, No. 1).
To fully understand the essay, it's essential to know the context in which it was written. By the end of the 20th century, the art world was in a state of flux. The rise of digital media and conceptual art had seemingly shattered the traditional understanding of what an artistic medium could be.
Key takeaways from her position include: The Death of Medium Specificity Art risks becoming
Why is this essay—written decades ago—still relevant? Because we are in the middle of another medium crisis:
| | Greenberg's Modernist View (Pre-1990s) | Krauss's Post-Medium View (1999 & beyond) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Definition of Medium | A unique, pure set of material properties (e.g., the flatness of canvas) | A "technical support" : a set of rules and conventions derived from material conditions | | Goal of the Artist | Exploit and purify the inherent properties of a chosen medium | Generate new conventions and reinvent an obsolete or new technical support | | Attitude to Other Media | Purist; avoid hybridity or "impurity" to maintain the medium's specificity | Embraces aggregation and heterogeneity ; the medium is a "complex structure of interlocking and interdependent technical supports" | | Artistic Practice | Focused on a single, traditional practice (e.g., painting, sculpture) | Appropriates obsolete technologies (like slide projectors) and new media to create unprecedented forms |