Krauss examines three artists who, each in their own way, reinvented a medium:
When an artist uses an algorithm to generate an image, what is the medium? Is it photography? Is it coding?
. Krauss argues that for art to be meaningful, it must work within a set of constraints—it must have "rules" that the artist can follow or break. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
By the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of Conceptual art, installation art, and institutional critique shattered these neat categories. Artists began mixing performance, text, video, and found objects. This gave rise to what Krauss famously termed the
To appreciate “Reinventing the Medium,” one must first understand the state of art theory it was reacting against. Krauss examines three artists who, each in their
The essay posits that every genuine artistic medium is a form of . The artist does not invent a new medium from scratch. Rather, they find a dormant technical support (like a postcard, a phonograph, or a video monitor) and "reinvent" it by uncovering its internal, forgotten logic.
Since this is a seminal academic text, it is widely available through various educational platforms. You can typically find it via: Artists began mixing performance, text, video, and found
Under Clement Greenberg’s modernism, the “medium” was defined by its physical limits. Painting was flatness and pigment; sculpture was volume and gravity. The goal of modernist art was to purify the medium, stripping away anything that belonged to another art form (literature, theater, architecture). By the 1970s, however, this logic had exhausted itself. Minimalism and Conceptualism attacked the very idea of artistic purity, leading many critics to declare the death of the medium.
The second path is an internal art-world debate focused on the systematic "destruction" of the aesthetic conditions long associated with photography. This destructive impulse was a broader 20th-century phenomenon, influencing everyone from to the conceptual artists who succeeded him. By rejecting the idea that art's value lies in its formal, aesthetic qualities, this path paved the way for a condition in which any object or gesture could be considered art, effectively destroying the foundation of medium specificity.
Krauss’s theory of reinventing the medium saved the concept of the medium from the dustbin of history. She transformed it from a rigid container of purity into a fluid space of strategic resistance.