In "Reinventing the Medium," Krauss does not advocate for a reactionary return to oil painting or bronze sculpture. Instead, she argues that contemporary artists must reinvent the idea of a medium from within the wreckage of modernism. 1. The Post-Media Condition
[Commercial Slide-Tape Projector] │ ▼ (Adopted by the Artist) [Exploration of Constraints] ──► (Discontinuity, Narration, Stillness vs. Motion) │ ▼ (Result) [Reinvented Medium / Aesthetic Significance]
This document provides an overview and analysis of Rosalind Krauss's essay "Reinventing the Medium." The summary is as follows: 1) Scribd
Krauss insists that a reinvented medium cannot be reduced to any single element of the apparatus. Instead, it – and each new artist working in that medium must re-negotiate the entire apparatus. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
"Reinventing the Medium" is Krauss's attempt to rescue the concept of the medium from this ideological graveyard. Rather than abandoning the term, she argues we must reinvent it. She does this by introducing a series of interconnected ideas that have become foundational to media studies, digital art theory, and contemporary criticism.
Rosalind Krauss’s “Reinventing the Medium” argues that the medium is not a given but an . An artist reinvents the medium by:
: The most reliable way is through a university or public library's subscription to JSTOR, ProQuest, or the University of Chicago Press Journals (the publisher of Critical Inquiry ). You can typically search for the article by title or DOI (10.1086/448921). In "Reinventing the Medium," Krauss does not advocate
Rather than hiding the clunking mechanism of the projector, Coleman makes the structural limitations of the machine central to the viewer's experience.
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.
Krauss rejects two dominant responses to this crisis: "Reinventing the Medium" is Krauss's attempt to rescue
Her framework allows critics to differentiate between sloppy digital collage (no reinvention) and rigorous new media art (exploiting the glitch, the buffer, the packet loss as a formal property).
In the landscape of contemporary art criticism, few essays have exerted as profound an influence as Rosalind Krauss’s seminal text, "Reinventing the Medium." Originally published in 1999, this work fundamentally challenged how art historians, critics, and artists understand the concept of an artistic medium in a post-media age. For students, scholars, and art enthusiasts searching for the , understanding the core arguments, historical context, and theoretical stakes of this essay is essential.