Rosalind Krauss’s essay "Reinventing the Medium" reframes how we think about artistic media, challenging the simple idea that each art form has a single, stable "medium" (painting, sculpture, photography). Instead, Krauss argues that media are historically and institutionally produced: what counts as a medium changes through artistic practice, critical discourse, and museum and market systems. This shift moves the conversation from essentialist definitions toward relations, techniques, and conditions that produce meaning.
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.
The essay’s most generative contribution is its emphasis on medium as a problem rather than a category. Rather than asking “Is this painting?” we ask: what networks—material, technological, economic, discursive—make this object legible as a painting? This approach opens analysis to interdisciplinary practices (video, installation, conceptual art) and to media that are procedural or relational rather than object-based.
Why it matters today: Krauss’s thinking anticipates the fluidity of contemporary art, where digital practices, time-based media, and participatory projects resist neat classification. Her framework encourages critics and artists to attend to context—the exhibition format, technological affordances, and institutional economies—that shape how works are experienced and valued.
Takeaways for readers and creators:
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Which would you prefer?
Krauss explicitly distinguishes her concept from digital “new media” theorists (e.g., Lev Manovich). For Manovich, new media are defined by computational properties (modularity, automation, variability). For Krauss, these are not artistic media because they lack internal, convention-based constraints.
A true artistic medium must have specificity—not technological specificity, but formal and operational specificity derived from an artist’s sustained exploration of a support. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
Krauss borrows a term from psychology and surrealism: Automatism. In art, she uses it to describe the "default settings" of a medium.
Think of painting. The default support is the canvas. The default tool is the brush. An artist who doesn't question these things is operating on "automatic pilot." They are just making another painting because that’s what painters do.
For Krauss, the crisis of modern art occurred when artists could no longer blindly rely on these conventions. The old supports (the canvas, the pedestal) became hollow. If art was to survive, it couldn't just abandon the idea of a medium—it had to reinvent it.
Rosalind Krauss’s “Reinventing the Medium” argues that the medium is not a given but an achievement. An artist reinvents the medium by: If you’d like, I can:
In doing so, the artist creates medium-specificity without modernism—a way for art to be formally intelligent and historically aware after the death of the traditional fine arts.
In an era of AI-generated images, NFTs, and post-Internet art, “Reinventing the Medium” offers a vital toolkit. It asks us not to abandon the question “What is this art’s medium?” but to answer it differently: not by naming a material (oil on canvas, digital file) but by describing the recursive operations that give the work its internal coherence and difference.
For Krauss, the medium is not a prison but a game – one whose rules are made up as we go along, but without which there is no play at all.