Rosalind Krauss

Rosalind Krauss
and American
Philosophical Art
Criticism
Shirley Kaneda, Smooth Abrasion, 2000, 76"x 64" oil, pencil on canvvas. Courtesy of Feigen
Contemporary, NYC.
Rosalind Krauss
and American
Philosophical Art Crit
icism
From Formalism to Beyond
Postmodernism
David Carrier
PRAEGER
D) Westport, Connecticut
London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carrier, David, 1944-

Rosalind Krauss and American philosophical art criticism : from formalism to beyond
postmodernism / David Carrier.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-275-97520-7 (alk. paper)
1. Krauss, Rosalind E.—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Art criticism—United
States—History—20th century. 3. Art Philoshpy. I. Title
N7483.K7 C37 2002
701r .18—dc21 2002066344
British Library of Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2002 by David Carrier
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002066344
ISBN: 0-275-97520-7
First published in 2002
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America
@r
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
This book is for Alexander Nehamas
This page intentionally left blank
In evaluating a perspective, we must always ask, 'To whose life
does it contribute?7' There is absolutely no reason to think that a
perspective that is good for one type of person will also be good
for another—not to speak of "all others/ 7
Alexander Nehamas
The struggle of the spirit is just as brutal as the battle of men.

Rimbaud
Contents
Preface xi
Introduction: The Rise of Philosophical Art Criticism 1
Chapter 1. In the Beginning Was Formalism 17
Chapter 2. The Structuralist Adventure 33
Chapter 3. The Historicist, Antiessentialist Definition of Art 55
Chapter 4. Resentment and Its Discontents 71
Chapter 5. The Deconstruction of Structuralism 87
Afterword: The Fate of Philosophical Art Criticism 111
Index 123
Preface
This book tells the story of Rosalind Krauss's intellectual career. This
preface is where I briefly explain my background, telling how and
why I came to write this account. Trained as a philosopher, in 1980 I
started writing art criticism. The inspired writing of Joseph
Masheck, then editor of Artforum, initially led me to focus on ab-
stract painting. Thanks to supportive editors at Artforum, Art in
America, Arts Magazine, Artlnternational, The Burlington Magazine,
Modern Painters, Kunst Chronik, and Tema Celeste, I have published a
great deal of art criticism in the past twenty years.
As a critic, I was especially concerned to write about what I saw.
But I often wondered how to wrrite a history of art from this period,
which is not easy to understand. Like every American critic, I read
Rosalind Krauss's publications and her journal October. And I re-
viewed a number of her books.1 It took me a long time to see that a
study of her career was the best way to describe the development of
American artwriting in the era after Abstract Expressionism. Krauss
is a famous critic, but no one yet has evaluated her achievement.
Writing as an analytic philosopher, my aim is to tell her story, show-
ing how she deals in very challenging ways with philosophical con-
cerns. Krauss's books are readily accessible, and so I am not
concerned with summarizing them. My aim, rather, is to present and
debate her contribution to the philosophical study of visual art.
XII Preface
Copyright restrictions permit me to quote only three hundred

words from each of her books, and so often I paraphrase.
The 1996 Bielefeld author conference devoted to Arthur Danto
helped me understand how the concerns of analytic philosophers
and art critics intersect. Thanks to Julia Perkins and Brian C. Fay, I
published the proceedings in History and Theory.2 When I was visit-
ing lecturer at Princeton University in 1998, Alexander Nehamas
and I discussed perspectivism, a subject central to my analysis of
Krauss's writings. Nothing I write will meet his standards, but I
learned from his fanatical lucidity. In an interview with me he said:3
I do believe the features that characterize oneself and one's life are
similar to the features of literary works. The virtues of life are compa-
rable to the virtues of good writing—style, connectedness, grace, ele-
gance—and also, we must not forget, sometimes getting it right. Of
course I'm an aesthete, I'm an unabashed aesthete. My main difficulty
with the late twentieth century in America is that we neither respect nor
admire enough what we used to call "aesthetic values." Is that bad?
I wondered how his account was consistent with the much dis-
cussed claim that postmodernism makes aesthetic values passe. The
beginning of the Introduction uses his ideas and at the end of the
Afterword I offer a tentative answer to his question.
Paul Barolsky, James Elkins, Shirley Kaneda, Catherine Lee,
George J. Leonard, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Robert Mangold, Saul
Ostrow, Robert Ryman, Gary and Loekie Schwartz, Sean Scully, Tim-
othy J. Standring, Garner Tullis, and Barbara Westman have dis-
cussed art and artwriting with me. Kaneda provided my fontispiece.
And I thank Bill Berkson, Peggy and Richard Kuhns, Robert
Pincus-Witten, and the late Mark Roskill for reading drafts of this
manuscript, Stephen Bann gave suggestions about Rene Girard;
Mark Cheetham discussed Kant with me and found a bibliography
of writings by and about Krauss; Whitney Davis described the recep-
tion of his controversial essay discussed in chapter 1; many years
ago, Albert Elsen showed me the Rodins at Stanford, opening the
back door to the gates of hell; Otto Karl Werkmeister 's Icons of the Left
(1999) gave me the epigraph from Rimbaud; and William Tucker
made an unpublished lecture available to me. I report bits and pieces
of remembered conversations with Clement Greenberg. Arthur
Danto gave the key to the discussion of Greimas, and when in the early
1980s we toured Northern Italy together, his response to a street festival
Preface xiii
in Verona was one inspiration for the present Afterword.4 Danto's

more recent characterization of my writing helped suggest how to
present this account.5 All my publications should be dedicated to my
wife, Marianne Novy, for she has helped me to argue and write more
effectively.
The Afterword supplements my "Memory & Oblivion in Con-
temporary American Art: The Lesson of Artforum/' given at the 29th
International Conference on the History of Art, Amsterdam, 1996,
and published in the proceedings of that conference. I borrow from
my lecture on connoisseur ship given at Princeton University; in four
Swedish Universities; at the National Academy of Art, Hangzhou;
and as 1999 Harvey Buchanan Lecturer in Art History and the Hu-
manities, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. And I thank Laurie
Schneider, editor of Source, for publishing two essays on Andy
Warhol which contain ideas developed in different ways here.
This book, written in spring 1999, was withheld after Krauss's
medical emergency. When I circulated the manuscript, after her con-
dition stabilized, I learned how controversial she is. One publisher
felt that I was much too critical, whereas several otherwise sympa-
thetic readers of my work were surprised that I thought her writings
deserving of close study. One editor who rejected this book told me
that she would publish it were she not a friend of several of the critics
I discuss. I thank Roger Conover, Jonathan Gilmore, and two anony-
mous readers for Greenwood Press for helpful comments, which I
have used.6
Any reader of biographies knows the difficulty of writing about
near contemporaries. In her autobiography, Muriel Spark, com-
plaining about published accounts of her life, writes: 7
The disturbing thing about false and erroneous statements is that

well-meaning scholars tend to repeat each other. Lies are like fleas
hopping from here to there, sucking the blood of the intellect. . . .Truth
by itself is neutral and has its own dear beauty.
Many artworld people know a great deal about Krauss's life, and
so she is sure to be the subject of an intellectual biography. Much
could be revealed by describing her alliances, friendships, and ene-
mies; however, this study of her ideas is based almost entirely upon
her publications. In an earlier book, I critically discussed Charles
Baudelaire's art criticism.8 Here, similarly, I write about Krauss's
publications. I am not interested in gossip about her. I have never
XIV Preface
met Krauss, though I once heard her lecture, and long ago she gener-
ously responded to a minor query. For me, she is a marvelous origi-
nal writer, always inventive, and never dull. I respectfully argue
with her because she makes exciting claims worth debating.
April 2001
NOTES
1. See my reviews of Passages in Modern Sculpture, Journal of Aes-
thetics and Art Criticism 36, 4 (1978): 510-512; The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Burlington Magazine (No-
vember 1985): 817; The Picasso Papers, Art Journal 57,4 (winter 1998):
102-105.
2. History and Theory Theme Issue 37 (1998).
3. "Talking with Alexander Nehamas," Bomb no. 65 (Fall 1998):
38.1 quote from the full original interview.
4. See my "Baudelaire, Pater and the Origins of Modernism," in
Comparative Criticism: An Annual Journal, ed. E. S. Shaffer, 17 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 109-121.
5. "Symposium: On David Carrier's Artwriting," Journal of Aes-
thetic Education 32, 4 (winter 1998): 27-59, including my "Reply to
James Elkins, Arthur C. Danto, and Richard Kuhns," 51-59.
6. Jonathan Gilmore, The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in
the Narrative History of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000),
contributing significantly to the discussion, challenges my analy-
sis.
7. Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p 11.
8. David Carrier, High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of
Modernism (University Park: Perm State Press, 1996).
INTRODUCTION
The Rise of Philosophical

Art Criticism
We are engaged in a collective enterprise whose results can't always be

easily traced. Some kind of marketplace of arguments and ideas may
generate developments of value that wouldn't have been produced
just by the greatest thinkers working individually and responding to
each other.
Thomas Nagel
Visual art often is accompanied by words. Art critics evaluate con-

temporary art, and historians reconstruct the meaning of work from
earlier times. The w o r d s a c c o m p a n y i n g m o d e r n i s t and
postmodernist art have special importance, for much of this work is
identifiable as art only because it is accompanied by theorizing.
Clement Greenberg is the most important American art critic. In the
1940s, almost alone, he influentially championed Jackson Pollock
and the other Abstract Expressionists. Properly understood, he ar-
gued these painters developed the tradition of French modernism,
which in turn works out the essential concerns of the old masters. In
the 1960s, when the importance of Greenberg's view of the 1940s
was generally accepted, his analysis of newer art was rejected by
most younger critics. There was a well-developed market in contem-
porary art, and so someone had to replace him.
2 Rosalind Krauss
In the 1960s, Rosalind Epstein Krauss was but one of many critics
who, after starting as a follower of Greenberg, went her own way.
From the late 1990s perspective, she is, without visible rival, the
most influential American critic of her era. How, Alexander
Nehamas asks,1
[C]an one achieve the perfect unity and freedom that are primarily
possessed by perfect literary characters?
One way of achieving this perhaps impossible goal might be to write

a great number of very good books that exhibit great apparent incon-
sistencies among them but that can be seen to be deeply continuous
with one another when they are read carefully and well.
This is what Krauss has done. Her development has four stages: (1)
her early formalist essays from the 1960s and her book on David
Smith, Terminal Iron Works, published when she was close to
Greenberg; (2) the antiformalist narrative history of modernist
sculpture developed in the 1970s in Passages in Modern Sculpture; (3)
the structuralist antinarrative theorizing presented in the 1980s in
The Originality of the Avant-Garde; and (4) the poststructuralist ac-
counts of her recent studies of the semiology of cubism and the 'in-
formal' in modernism and postmodernism. I want to write what
Nehamas describes as
a book about these books that shows how they fit together, how a sin-
gle figure emerges through them, how even the most damaging con-
tradictions may have been necessary for that figure or character or
author or person ... to emerge fully from them.2
Krauss has moved an enormous distance in thirty years. The story

of her career can, with pardonable exaggeration, be taken for the his-
tory of American criticism in this period. After Greenberg, no one
has had as much influence on American art critics as Krauss. Her
style of argument (though not always her taste) has been immensely
important. Many art critics and, more recently, some art historians
are heavily indebted to her ways of thinking. With her collaborators
at October, the journal she cofounded, Krauss defined the dominant
style of present-day academic art writing. With only three thousand
subscribers, this publication has had great influence. Art historians
who now so readily evoke the names of Derrida, Foucault, and
Lacan owe something to October.
Introduction 3
I reconstruct Krauss's career, explaining the transitions in her

thought, and evaluating her arguments. Krauss has written interest-
ingly about David Smith, surrealism, and a host of modern and
postmodern artists working in a variety of media. Like most strong
interpretations, hers are highly controversial. I do not evaluate her
tastes in contemporary art—this is a study of her theorizing. She ap-
pears to be a formidable personality. That is to the good, for in the
artworld virtue is not its own reward. Krauss is a philosophical art
critic. When immediately accessible art critics such as Frank O'Hara
review an exhibition, their writing contains no abstract reasoning.
By contrast, philosophical art critics do serious theorizing. A philo-
sophical art critic is both historiographer and aesthetician—the
critic's account of what art is often determines how art's history is
narrated. This story about the rise of Krauss and philosophical art
criticism is a story about the American artworld. In Europe,
Greenberg and his successors are much less important.
Greenberg's analysis of Abstract Expressionism was inspired, in
part, by philosophical argumentation. Pollock's "illusion of indeter-
minate but somehow definitely shallow depth . . . reminds me of
what Picasso and Braque arrived at thirty odd years before, with the
facet-planes of their Analytical Cubism." 3 Analytic Cubism was im-
portant, and if Pollock's art was similar in this way, it also was im-
portant. People ignorant of Greenberg's theory could not see this
similarity. When, by contrast, O'Hara writes of Number I,4 "this is the
classical period of Pollock, classical in all its comprehensive, master-
ful, and pristine use of his own passions, classical in its cool, ultimate
beauty... Pollock is the Ingres, and de Kooning the Delacroix, of Ac-
tion Painting. Their greatness is equal but antithetical," his eloquent
description is straightforward. O'Hara, as much of an intellectual as
Greenberg, was a different sort of critic.
Philosophical art critics are special sorts of art writers. Vasari and
Hegel are philosophical art critics, as are Erwin Panofsky (and some
of his German precursors and contemporaries); so too are John
Ruskin, Walter Pater, Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg, Ernst
Gombrich, Michael Fried, and Arthur Danto. But such indisputably
great art writers as Diderot and Baudelaire are not philosophical art
critics—nor are most journalists publishing in Artforum or the
Burlington Magazine. It is possible to write highly distinguished art
criticism without being a philosophical art critic.
Some philosophical art critics place philosophical concerns center
stage. Hegel is of course centrally concerned with such theorizing.
4 Rosalind Krauss
But Vasari and Greenberg are only marginally concerned with

philosophical problems. A philosophical art critic need not be an art
historian. Judged by present-day standards, Ruskin and Fry barely
qualify as art historians. Nor need a philosophical art critic be a dis-
tinguished philosopher. Pater and Greenberg borrow from philoso-
phy in frankly eclectic ways. Few great philosophers of art are
philosophical art critics. Kant, for all of his influence on philosophi-
cal art critics, is too far removed from art history to be a philosophi-
cal art critic; the same is true of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and John Dewey. A philosophical art critic must both be
an art critic and be involved with philosophical concerns. Philo-
sophical art critics thus inevitably are odd in-between figures. Their
strictly philosophical interests often puzzle art historians; their con-
cern with art's history is likely to pass by philosophers.
Along with her only true present-day American rival, Danto,
K r a u s s offers a c h a l l e n g i n g a c c o u n t of t h e o r e t i c a l a n d
historiographic problems of contemporary art. Because Danto is a
philosopher well known among aestheticians and historiographers,
his theorizing has been much discussed. 5 Krauss's vocabulary is less
accessible to most American philosophers, and so her achievement
as philosopher of art history has attracted less recognition. This book
aims to change that situation.
Philosophical art critics often are criticized for being cavalier
about facts.6 They are more likely to make errors than narrow spe-
cialists. Hegel and Pater got historical details wrong, but their theo-
ries remain interesting. Philosophical art critics need to be evaluated
by appropriate standards. But that should not be taken as a license
for suspending normal scholarly concerns with truth. Krauss apolo-
gizes for introducing Serra's art via discussion of Giacometti:
"Giacometti's work has neither any real interest nor any relevance to
his own." 7 That statement gains authority because it appears in a
commissioned essay. But in fact Serra has said:8
Philip Glass and I . . . would go to La Coupole every night. At two in

the morning, Giacometti would usually come in. . . . We were very
young, and for us, he epitomized the image of the working sculptor.
The fact that he reduced sculpture to a plaster kernel as a catalyst for
his understanding of the world was as interesting as anything going
on at that time.
Yet Krauss's interpretation of Serra remains of great interest.

Introduction 5
A major philosophical art critic summarizes the cultural history

of an era. Krauss is the first major female philosophical art critic. Not
conspicuously identified with feminism in her publications, Krauss
is of the first generation when academic women played a major role.
When she recently writes, "art made by women needs no special
pleading," she takes as given this achievement.9 Historians who
want to understand feminism in art history will look closely at her
books. So will scholars who want to know why "postmodernism"
became so important in the 1980s. What will interest them, I predict,
are less Krauss's errors and confusions than her amazing ingenuity.
Presenting a highly selective history of American art criticism since
Greenberg, I aim to bridge the gap between aestheticians and work-
ing art critics, writers who usually are very far apart. Krauss herself
has mostly formulated her claims in the vocabularies of the French
structuralist and poststructuralist writers. Her argument gains
much in accessibility if presented in the lucid language of analytic
philosophy. Krauss is a great subject for the analytic philosopher, for
she says much of interest worth arguing about.
Krauss's development is dialectical. What motivates transitions at
each point is the felt recognition of the inadequacy of her earlier way
of thinking. Rejecting formalism, she constructed the developmental
history of Passages—an alternative to Greenberg's history. Then in
The Originality she rejects narrative histories, replacing them with the
atemporal structures displayed in Greimas's structuralist diagrams.
Finally, in her recent publications she abandons the claim to show the
historical structure of modernism and postmodernism. The Original-
ity supposes that there is one determinate way of translating the tem-
poral development of visual art into a structure. Krauss now
recognizes that there are diverse ways of telling her story. What
marks the transition, at each stage of her career, is a new way of nar-
rating the history of art. Her formalist writings employ Greenberg's
Hegelian historiography. They treat modernism as making explicit
the nature of art that was implicit in the old masters. In Passages she
finds an alternative way of describing the development of modernist
sculpture. Then in The Originality, the third stage, Krauss rejects nar-
ratives altogether in favor of a s t r u c t u r a l i s t account of
postmodernism. Finally, in her poststructuralist discussions of cub-
ism and surrealist photography she acknowledges and overcomes
the problems inherent in a structural account of art's history.
Krauss's abandonment of narratives is associated with American
interest in French-style structuralism; her turn to semiotic analysis
6 Rosalind Krauss
and the "informal" is her deconstruction of structuralism. 10 Krauss's

development is the product of her active engagements as an art
critic. Only after the fact can we reconstruct her development in my
terms. Too many Americans who read French theorists applied their
ideas in mechanical ways. What gives authenticity to Krauss's de-
velopment is her active working through of the problems of art criti-
cism and art history. She uses, and does not merely appropriate,
continental theorizing. My account of Krauss's development differs,
I would expect, from her own view of this self-fashioning. Krauss
has worked hard to move away from a developmental way of think-
ing about art's history, and this book sets her writing in a develop-
mental structure. But just as her career reflects concern to give the
most convincing account of art, so I attempt to provide the best pos-
sible analysis of her position. As I do not know her personally, when
I explain why she changes her mind, or describe her goals, I refer
only to what can be deduced from her publications. "My" Krauss,
thus, is Krauss-the-author. It would be tedious to continually qual-
ify my assertions, saying "probably Krauss believed" or "most likely
Krauss wanted." My reconstruction of her ways of thinking pre-
tends to be more confident than it can honestly be.
For a long time I wanted to write a book combining the sweeping
boldness of Fredric Jameson's histories with the conceptual clarity
provided by analytic philosophy. I wanted to write something like
Danto's book Jean-Paul Sartre, but with a subject from my
world—the artworld. It took me a long time to see that my subject
was Krauss. In his sympathetic review of The Optical Unconscious,
Danto argues that11
Krauss7 way to the optical unconscious is through a sort of free associ-

ation, writing down what is suggested to her by what she has written
down, moving from Ruskin to Fried to Conrad to Jameson to
Mondrian to . . . to. . . . So the book is inherently allusive and, one
might say, adjunctive, rather than logical and narrational.
I disagree. Krauss's seemingly free associations are governed by a

strange but logical argument which I spell out. In this book I sus-
pend judgment about the comparative merit of Danto's and
Krauss's view of philosophical art history. In the Afterword I explain
why it is too early to judge the ultimate merits of her claims.
Krauss can be silly, determinedly mean spirited, and wrong
headed. But she is consistently original. Only scholars who don't
Introduction 7
take risks always succeed. She deserves her fame, for without her
our artworld would be a far different, quite less interesting place.
Her failures and limitations, as much as her successes, are revealing.
Unlike Jameson, whose Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism
is a proper treatise, Krauss appears an unsystematic thinker. She has
a disconcerting habit of borrowing fragments of theories, without
regard for questions of internal consistency. Unlike their colleagues
who study literature, art critics tend to be bricoleurs. Neither Diderot,
Baudelaire, nor Pater or Roger Fry are original philosophers—they
borrow and adapt ideas. In art history, as in other domains of intel-
lectual life (and in art itself), the greatest recognition and profes-
sional esteem go to those capable of deep originality. To become an
academic art historian, a student must learn the skills of professors.
Of the graduate students who become professors, only a small mi-
nority makes significant innovations. To show skilled mastery of the
established methodologies and to extend these familiar approaches
to new materials are significant achievements. But at the highest lev-
els, much more is expected. Admiration for deep innovation reflects
the demands of the intellectual marketplace. A discipline unable to
achieve serious innovation would not attract good students or ade-
quate support. Demand for innovation is a natural expectation of a
culture where changes in everyday life come quickly.
To see how good Krauss is, look at some of her would-be competi-
tors. In the 1960s and 1970s, various histories of twentieth-century
sculpture reflected the concerns of contemporary artists. Krauss's
Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) deserves comparison with such
rivals as William Tucker's Early Modern Sculpture (1974) and Jack
Burnham's Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968). Tucker, a distinguished
sculptor, writes with great sensitivity. Perhaps it was possible al-
ready in 1974 to sense that he would turn back historically in his
sculpture, moving from his earlier abstractions to art rooted in the
tradition of Rodin, Degas, and the other early modernist masters de-
scribed in his book.12 Tucker is more visually sensitive than Krauss,
but Early Modern Sculpture was irrelevant to the leading new devel-
opments of the 1970s—installations, earth works, and minimalism.
Unlike Krauss, Tucker builds no bridge between early modernism
and the present. Burnham certainly is concerned with the present;
and he, like Krauss, was reading the structuralist literature. Why
then did Beyond Modern Sculpture have so much less impact than Pas-
sages? Burnham, a muddled thinker, championed the wrong new
art. He was fascinated by dreary mechanical sculpture that used
8 Rosalind Krauss
electronic apparatus and blinking lights—what he calls Robot and

Cyborg Art. As Robert Mangold has recently noted, such work was
in fashion: "There was a silliness in a lot of Pop Art and Kinetic Art of
this time—art that moved, blinked, made sounds, was gaglike. I was
not interested in any of that stuff."13 Neither, it turned out, was the
artworld at large.14
When a critical paradigm is exhausted, there are conflicts among
new competing methodologies. "By the end of the sixties it was clear
that formalist abstraction had been challenged by a new set of formal
and moral values."15 After Greenberg's taste and theorizing were re-
jected, what interpretative approach would replace his? Robert
Pincus-Witten, one of the best critics of the day and a gifted original
writer, offers a very subtle account of this moment. "Greenberg . . . re-
ally mattered because he pointed to shifts in style and these recogni-
tions had the effect of even further intensifying such dislocations." 16
What might reasonably have been expected was that Greenberg's
successor would also develop such a stylistic analysis. But that ex-
pectation turned out to be mistaken. What in retrospect appears lim-
ited about Pincus-Witten's own art criticism is its very closeness to
Greenberg's. Pincus-Witten disagreed with Greenberg's taste, but
like him wanted to identify the new period style. Post minimalism
(1977), a collection of essays mostly published in the most important
American journal of the era, Artforum, offers well-informed ac-
counts of many of the best-known New York artists accompanied by
a p l a u s i b l e h i s t o r i c a l p l a n . W h a t P i n c u s - W i t t e n calls
"Postminimalism" stands to minimalism roughly as, for Greenberg,
the 1960s "Post-Painterly Abstraction" of Louis, Noland, and Olitski
stands to Abstract Expressionism.
By comparison with Pincus-Witten's essays, Fredric Jameson's
"Postmodernism and Consumer Society" is an extremely abstract
account whose relevance to working art critics is elusive. In its origi-
nal published form, Jameson's essay mentions "Andy Warhol and
Pop art, but also the more recent Photorealism" just in passing.17 In
the longer version appearing in 1984, Jameson discusses Warhol's
Diamond Dust Shoes, contrasting them to Vincent Van Gogh's A Pair
of Boots as described by Martin Heidegger, as speaking of "a new
kind of superficiality in the most literal sense."18 Pincus-Witten's
"postminimalism" invoked a very Greenbergian ideal of artistic
continuity. Postmodernism, as presented by Jameson (and Krauss),
involves a break with the past. Jameson had only a slight interest in
art history. Why then was his way of thinking about history more in-
Introduction 9
fluential than Pincus-Witten's? In the 1980s, there was a felt need to

believe that the most serious new art broke radically with tradition.
In his recent essay on Brice Marden's late 1960s-early 1970s paint-
ings, Pincus-Witten observes that "Marden's w o r k is spared the
dicey shelf life that devaluates most contemporary art, be it rooted in
the techniques of advertising (as is n o w commonly the case), or one
that inevitably engages matters of entertainment." 1 9 O u r artworld
has a short attention span.
Krauss's most serious rival philosophical art critic w a s Michael
Fried. C o m p a r e d with his elaborate accounts of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century art, her historical studies are merely adventur-
ous. Set against his intently admiring commentary on the artists he
encountered w h e n he w a s young—Anthony Caro, Frank Stella,
Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons—Krauss's appreciations of Serra
and the other figures she wrote about early on are slight. However
m u c h Fried's professional sense of philosophical issues m a y owe to
his friendship with Stanley Cavell, it makes her intellectual culture
s e e m a m a t e u r i s h . A n d yet, K r a u s s , n o t F r i e d , b e c a m e the
post-Greenbergian critic. Fried at his best is a formidable critic: 20
At his strongest... Warhol has a painterly competence, a sure instinct

for vulgarity ... and a feeling for what is truly human and pathetic in
one of the exemplary myths (Marilyn Monroe) of our time that I for
one find moving; but I am not at all sure that even the best of Warhol's
work can much outlast the journalism on which it is forced to depend.
When his taste is challenged deeply, Fried makes surprising ob-

servations. But w h o today reading his awestruck commentaries on
Caro, Olitski, and Noland can avoid Schadenfreude? These figures,
w h o rode so high, have fallen so far that they wait to be revived, like
forgotten nineteenth-century Salon painters.
Unlike his mentor Greenberg, Fried did not discover a single art-
ist w h o stood the test of time. 21
Noland's ambition to make major art out of color has compelled him
to discover structures on which that ambition can rely—structures in
which the shape of the support is acknowledged lucidly and explic-
itly enough to compel conviction.
Who today believes that? Fried thought that the best new art was
developing out of tradition. He said that Olitski, Noland, and Stella
were taking u p the concerns of Abstract Expressionism. Krauss
10 Rosalind Krauss
started out as a Greenbergian formalist, but parted from him when

she came to believe that the most challenging new art broke radi-
cally with tradition. Krauss embraced postmodernism, and that
way of thinking, and not Fried's preoccupation with maintaining
tradition, which now dominates almost all artworld thinking.
Fried's theorizing is complex and often obscure.22 He elaborately
distinguished the artists he admired from minimalists such as Carl
Andre and pop artists such as Warhol, and he worked hard to ex-
plain his differences with Greenberg's theory of modernism. But
their differences were only of academic interest when the visual cul-
ture has moved on.
A great deal of Greenberg's authority comes from his prophetic
judgments. But a critic is not valued just for his taste. Diderot pas-
sionately admired Greuze, but had only a premonition of the great-
ness of David; Baudelaire wrote his best essay, "The Painter of
Modern Life," about Constantin Guys, not his friend Manet. Ruskin
praised Turner when that painter was already old and famous; and
Roger Fry championed Cezanne only after that artist's death. And,
at a much lower level, in the 1980s I supported painters and sculp-
tors who have disappeared. So too did Fried and Krauss—where to-
day are Michael Bolus or John Mason, whom they praised highly? 23
All art critics have their philosophical moments. In his Salons,
Diderot now and then turns to philosophy, Baudelaire sketches a
theory of beauty, and Roger Fry develops a formalist theory of vi-
sual art. Mostly their writings can be understood without appeal to
elaborate theorizing. You don't need to be a Kant-scholar to under-
stand Fry's accounts of Caravaggio and Cezanne. With Greenberg,
this division between journalistic art writing and philosophical art
criticism is effectively externalized in the division between his few
position statements and the body of his criticism. Theorizing essays
such as "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and "Abstract, Representational,
and So Forth" have only occasional reference to individual artists.24
Greenberg admired the Abstract Expressionists, it is often claimed,
because they fit into his theory of modernism. Late in life, he rejected
this view; and tended in conversation to downplay the importance
of his philosophical theorizing. "So I contradict myself," he told me
when I tried to pin him down, "so what?" He did not believe that his
tastes were determined by his theory of modernism. Because Danto
has written very extensively about philosophical art criticism, the
division in his writing between art criticism and theory is striking.
Often his reviews cite philosophical anecdotes, as when he de-
Introduction 11
scribes Alex Katz's cutouts with reference to a theory of perception

that describes the difference between seeing flat shapes "painted to
look like barns" and a visually indistinguishable real barn.25 But as
he has indicated, his philosophical arguments have only a some-
what distant relationship to his practice. He believes that ours is a
posthistorical period, an era when everything is possible. And so he
tends to like a great variety of art. What he likes, and how he de-
scribes art, in no way follow from his theorizing.
In Krauss's era, many writers wanted to make art criticism an aca-
demic subject. Journalistic art critics tell what they experience.
Philosophical art critics are bookish academics. Krauss describes
"Olitski's struggle to divest his art of drawing and yet to maintain
the flexibility of the surface through the identification of different
colors with that surface, became the object of his painting. . . . Mi-
chael Fried has discussed the successive phases of this struggle." 26
She begins using Greenberg's theory of modernism, and closes with
reference to Fried. She gives an elaborate analysis of what might ap-
pear relatively straightforward abstract paintings. Recently, in de-
scribing this period, she has noted that "it was a big struggle to say
something about Olitski's work that wouldn't just be a repetition of
what Michael (Fried) had said about it."27 A great deal of 1960s art
looked simple but was said to be complex. Pop, minimalism, and
conceptual art—art that existed as art only in relation to philoso-
phizing—was a natural subject for philosophical art criticism. Art
history became an academic subject around the turn of the twentieth
century. Would it be possible to also bring art criticism into the uni-
versity? An art critic has an eye and a literary style. Universities
might teach such skills—creative writing is taught in many English
departments. The philosophical art critics of Krauss's generation,
who mostly were.academics, wanted to elevate their writing above
journalism. They sought to make criticism as philosophically seri-
ous as art history had been in its German origins. A gifted writer
might aspire to write criticism. Philosophical art criticism involves
mastering technical ways of thinking. Professional art historians
teach students to analyze objects collected in museums. When con-
temporary art is sold by art dealers to collectors and also to muse-
ums, philosophical art critics hoped to play a similar role.
Sometimes Krauss and her fellow philosophical art critics flirt
with the claim that their theories have validity because they appear
at the same time as the art being interpreted. "Although Rodin had
no contact with Husserl's philosophy, as far as we know, his sculp-
12 Rosalind Krauss
tures manifest a notion of the self which that philosophy had begun
to explore."28 Does the simultaneous development of cubism and
Saussure's linguistic theory explain why Krauss's semiotic analysis
is especially relevant to cubist paintings? 29 If an artist reads contem-
porary theorists, then simultaneity has explanatory value. But be-
cause Rodin did not know Husserl or Picasso and Braque read
Saussure, simultaneity proves nothing. 30 Krauss might make a
weaker claim: Husserl is relevant to Rodin, and Saussure to the cub-
ists because theorist and artist share a period style. This belief de-
serves to be questioned. When in the 1980s Danto became a famous
critic, the artists I knew were mostly reading such continental phi-
losophers as Deleuze and Foucault. Few painters took an interest in
Danto's Analytic Philosophy of History or his Analytic Philosophy of Ac-
tion. Mere temporal and geographic proximity does not mean that a
well-known theorist influences artists.
Some Renaissance art has exceedingly complicated iconogra-
phy—usually such artists had humanist advisors. And so today31
an iconographer trying to reconstruct the lost argument of a Renais-

sance painting . . . must learn more about Renaissance arguments
than the painter needed to know; and this is not, as has been claimed,
a self-contradiction, but the plain outcome of the undeniable fact that
we no longer enjoy the advantages of Renaissance conversation. We
must make up for it through reading and inference.
But could art from the critic's own era be understood only using
highly complex theorizing? Most contemporary artists are not intel-
lectuals. Maybe the art of Marcel Duchamp, Agnes Martin, or Cindy
Sherman is complex when described by philosophical art critics
only because such writers are too bookish.
Interpretation invokes describing art in terms known not to the
artist—need this be paradoxical? The Beatles could not read music,
but only a musicologist can explain why they were innovative com-
posers. Analogously, the reconstruction of a native speaker's gram-
mar might invoke theoretical distinctions he knew not. And so it is
not paradoxical that the linguist might understand that practice in
terms unknown to that speaker. The linguist makes predictions
about what sentences are grammatical. A native speaker knows cor-
rect speech, but not why it is correct. Theorists explain the speaker's
competence. But here another analogy with different implications is
also worth considering. Hockey players need not study physics. En-
Introduction 13
visage two ways of describing hockey: a scientific account and an in-

tuitive analysis a p p e a l i n g to the p l a y e r s ' i n t e n t i o n s . A
commonsense account appears in the sports reporting. A scientific
account, explaining the game in the vocabulary of physics, is diffi-
cult to imagine. Given the obvious plausibility of the commonsense
description, such an account seems superfluous. Analogously, it
may be hard to conceive of a description of an artwork that, not in a
vocabulary comprehensible to the artist, would offer a genuinely re-
vealing explanation of that work. And so perhaps philosophical art
criticism is problematic.
The body of this book, an exposition of Krauss's development, an-
swers these questions. In the Afterword I say more about the rela-
tionship of philosophical art criticism to philosophy.
NOTES
1. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge,
Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 195.
2. Ibid. p. 195.
3. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961),
p. 218.
4. Frank O'Hara, Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: George
Braziller, 1975), p. 30.
5. History and Theory, Theme Issue 37 (1998) devoted to Danto.
6. See, for example, the review of The Picasso Papers by Marilyn
McCully, New York Review of Books 46, 6 (April 8,1999): 18-24.
7. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and
Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 262.
8. Quoted in Barbaralee Diamonstein, Inside the Art World: Con-
versations with Barbaralee Diamonstein (New York: Rizzoli, 1994),
p. 227.
9. Rosalind E. Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999),
p. 50.
10. Yve-Alain Bois has explained his problems with the word
"poststructuralism" in his Painting as Model (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1990), p. 260 n. 7. See also Francois Dosse, History of
Structuralism, Volume 1, The Rising Sign, 1945-1966 and Volume 2,
The Sign Sets, 1967-Present, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
11. Arthur C. Danto, Review, The Optical Unconscious, Artforum
31 (summer 1993): 98.
14 Rosalind Krauss
12. See my "William Tucker at Storm King Art Center," Arts

(December 1988): 88; and his unpublished Fuller Lecture, "The
Hero and the Housemaid."
13. See my "Robert Mangold, Gray window wall, (1964),"
Burlington Magazine, 1125,138 (December 1996): 828.
14. When Burnham reviewed Passages (New Art Examiner 5, 10
[July 1978]: 4-5), he, in turn, found Krauss's analysis all too tradi-
tional.
15. Robert Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism (New York: Out of
London Press, 1977), p. 14.
16. Robert Pincus-Witten, Entries (Maximalism) (New York: Out
of London Press, 1983), p. 11.
17. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society,"
in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Cidture, ed. Hal Foster
(Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 111.
18. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 9.
19. Robert Pincus-Witten, "Rogue Equations," in Brice Marden:
Classic Paintings (New York: C&M Arts, 1999).
20. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 288.
21. Ibid., p. 139.
22. Fried's revelatory art history writing is another story. See my
reviews: Absorption and Theatricality, Art Monthly (September 1981):
35-36; Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 47,4 (1989): 398; Courbet's Realism, History and Theory, 30,3
(1991): 368-381; Manet's Modernism, Art Bulletin 79, 2 (June 1997):
334-337.
23. Michael Bolus is the subject of an essay in Fried, Art and
Objecthood, pp. 193-196; John Mason is discussed in Krauss's "John
Mason and Post-Modernist Sculpture: New Experiences, New
Words," Art in America 67, 3 (May-June 1979): 120-127.
24. Art and Culture gives a misleading picture of his concerns. In
Greenburg's collected writings, nearly all essays are exercises in
applied criticism.
25. Arthur C. Danto, Encounters & Reflections: Art in the Historical
Present (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990), p. 31.
26. "Jules Olitski," in Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings (Institute for
Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, and Flayden Gal-
lery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968), n.p.
Introduction 15
27. Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New

York: Soho Press, 2000), p. 223. Her interviews vividly describe the
struggles among Greenberg's successors.
28. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York:
Viking Press, 1977), p. 28, italics added,
29. Rosalind E. Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign," in Picasso
and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Mu-
seum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 299-300.
30. Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language & Lunacy, trans. Wil-
liam Weaver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 50.
If... somebody asked whether my writings have been influenced by
Dewey or Merleru-Ponty, the ... problem would be to establish, first,
whether there are detectable literal or conceptual analogies between
my work and theirs and, second, whether I had the physical possibil-
ity of reading the books of these authors.
31. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in The Renaissance (New York:
Norton, 1968), p. 15.
CHAPTER 1
In the Beginning Was

Formalism
The most important consideration when it comes to investing in art is a

long-term outlook. You need to ask questions. Which artists are the in-
novators? Which artists influenced their peers? Which artists produce
work that is visually seductive with intellectually challenging content?
Richard Polsky, Art Market Guide
A major philosophical art critic changes how his contemporaries

look at visual art. To understand such an artwriter, we need to know
why his arguments are found persuasive. Art criticism is a mixture
of observation and fantasy. Art externalizes "a way of viewing the
world, expressing the interior of a cultural period, offering itself as a
mirror."1 The same is true of successful artwriting.
Clement Greenberg's highly personal synthesis of formalism and
T.S. Eliot's view of culture and Marxist historiography persuaded
his contemporaries of the greatness of the Abstract Expressionists.
Greenberg's achievement has been much discussed, and so needs to
be summarized only briefly.2 In the 1930s, many American artists
made protest art. The Abstract Expressionists only became great
when they turned away from politics. Greenberg argued that in the
capitalism of his day, art's development was relatively isolated from
changes in the larger society. All that advanced artists could expect
by way of support was patrons—Abstract Expressionism marked
18 Rosalind Krauss
the triumph of art for art's sake. Greenberg argued that the best new
painting canceled and preserved the accomplishments of early
modernism. Art advanced in a country where political revolution
was not a serious option. A Marxist critic might have been expected
to identify revolutionary art, but Greenberg, following the politi-
cally conservative Eliot, argued that radically original painting built
upon, without breaking with, tradition.
Greenberg thus links art, politics, and morality. He implies that a
good connoisseur should be able to see Pollock's excellence and of-
fers a theory linking Abstract Expressionism to tradition. Some crit-
ics dismiss Greenberg entirely. He was, Dave Hickey writes, 3
an art critic from the postwar era whose practice and preferences were
totally discredited and defunct by the time I entered the art world in
1967. Academic critics [have been]... laying siege to Greenberg's gut-
ted and abandoned citadel for the past thirty years.
Peter Schjeldahl takes a similar viewr:4
The American art criticism, usually termed "formalist/' that flour-

ished in the '60s was of a piece with the time's American art, part of a
rhetorical onslaught, a generational power play, determined by his-
toric openings. But the criticism often argued one thing while the art,
more authentically, argued another.
Krauss also rejected Greenberg, but she takes his claims more seri-
ously.
As a Marxist, Greenberg distinguishes between the popular liter-
ary and visual art and demanding advanced modernist culture,
which is unpopular. Popular art forms, parasitic upon the elite cul-
ture, borrow7 from difficult art to make undemanding work. In some
future classless society, the masses may have the leisure needed to
appreciate fine art. But for now, there is large gap between the audi-
ences for popular and high art. Greenberg's accounts of the relation-
ship between art and money, of philosophical art criticism, and of
the link between art and morality contain tensions resolved by crit-
ics of the next generation. He sought to balance the concerns of con-
noisseurs and philosophical art critics. Many 1960s critics thought
that only esoteric theorizing could provide a proper guide to con-
temporary art. Greenberg separated popular and serious art. With
the development of pop art and interest in political protest art, al-
most everyone felt the need for a more flexible account of the rela-
In the Beginning Was Formalism 19
tion between mass culture and contemporary art. Pop art borrowed
from popular culture, taking images from comic strips into high art,
establishing a two-way relationship between kitsch and museum
painting.
Many recent critics of Greenberg, philosophers especially, write
as if he had developed a purely intellectual argument whose pre-
mises might be critiqued. In fact, he offered a critical practice well
adapted to his artworld. His way of thinking both reflected and
transformed the situation of art. And so when the culture changed,
his theorizing became obsolete. In the 1960s, the Abstract Expres-
sionists became successful and much admired, and so the role of
Greenberg's criticism was critically examined. Identifying these
painters as heir to the old master tradition, he helped create a market
for their art. Like many young would-be revolutionaries, Greenberg
and his artists turned into members of the establishment. His Marx-
ism had unexpected consequences—such is the cunning of history.
Greenberg's formalism was based upon a Marxist historiography
that the critics of Krauss's generation challenged. Greenberg
claimed that the Abstract Expressionists grew out of modernist tra-
dition; Krauss and her colleagues argued that the best contemporary
artists broke with tradition.
"What is the good of criticism?" Baudelaire's famous question al-
ways arises in that peculiar marketplace of ideas that constitutes the
artworld. What functions are served by commentary on contempo-
rary art? When a great deal of art is made, consumers need guides to
identify aesthetically valuable work. In a market economy, aesthetic
value quickly translates into economic value. People buying a mi-
crowave read Consumer Reports, which evaluates appliances in
straightforward empirical ways, citing comparative prices, effi-
ciency, and safety and repair records. Evaluation of paintings and
sculptures also calls for experts. Traditional critics were connois-
seurs. Gifted with an eye, good at detecting forgeries, experts in
Ming dynasty scrolls, baroque drawings, or Abstract Expressionist
paintings guide novice collectors. So long as an artistic tradition is
essentially stable, connoisseurs provide good guidance. But when
new, untraditional criteria of evaluation are demanded, philosophic
art critics are required. Only someone with a theory can explain why
Duchamp's ready mades, Rauschenberg's 1950s monochromes, or
the American conceptual art and earth art of the 1960s are art, or how
such exotic-looking artifacts should be judged.
20 Rosalind Krauss
To understand why Rosalind Krauss's arguments were highly

successful, we need to describe her culture and artworld. A philoso-
pher's arguments can perhaps be reconstructed ahistorically, as ex-
ercises in pure reason, but a philosophical art critic's claims must be
evaluated in historical and political context.
In a market economy, in China as much as in Europe and America,
aesthetic value is inevitably equated with exchange value. Once a
painting is thought very good, it becomes expensive. When
Greenberg argued that Pollock was a great painter, he established
the economic value of Pollocks. A generation earlier, Alfred
Stieglitz said that Georgia O'Keefe and other artists he favored were
major figures. In rejecting that claim and supporting the Abstract
Expressionists, Greenberg linked radical artistic originality with
economic value. A skilled capitalist entrepreneur, the successful
painter knows how to innovate. In the 1960s, Krauss notes, "the con-
solidation of the stylistic hegemony of the New York School con-
verted a provincial Bohemia into a Boomtown, a centre of
self-confident aesthetic energy on which there was lavished money,
glamour, attention." 5 In this process, she adds, art criticism played a
major role.
The relationship between art and money is difficult to describe
tactfully. Too often writers who moralize offer reductive accounts.
European art has almost always been associated with capitalist en-
trepreneurs. 6 Giotto and Titian, as much as Picasso and Matisse,
were good at making money. Duchamp offers a matter of fact obser-
vation: "Fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of
the artist. He's a man like any other. It's his job to do certain things,
but the businessman does certain things also."7 But in our American
artworld, it is hard to hold to this viewpoint. Duchamp lived
cheaply, generously supported by his patrons, and occasionally sold
art. In the 1960s, when New York became a boomtown, such a life-
style was difficult to sustain.
Consider two extreme views of the relationship between art criti-
cism and the sales of art. According to the reductive account, eco-
nomic value is defined by art critics. There may be no intrinsic
quality difference between the famous paintings of Morris Louis
and those of a somewhat similar facile decorative artist, Paul
Jenkins, whom no one any longer takes seriously. Louis's works are
very valuable, and Jenkins's are not, because Louis attracted presti-
gious champions and Jenkins did not. Art critics determine what art
is valuable. According to the purist account, there is no relation be-
tween economic value and art criticism. We can see the best art. Jas-
per Johns is highly valued because he is one of the great artists of his
generation—and not because Leo Steinberg and other important
writers championed his art. He attracted such champions because
his art was good.
The reductive account attributes to critics the power to determine
aesthetic and so economic value; the purist analysis asserts that crit-
ics have no influence on judgments of economic value. Neither ac-
count is entirely satisfactory. Looking at art of earlier eras, when art
criticism played a lesser role, we feel comfortable making judgments
of comparative quality. Raphael is generally superior to Peruguino;
Nicolas Poussin is usually better than Sebastien Bourdon. But when
we get to the present, it is easy to be more skeptical about the critical
consensus. If judgments about art involve esoteric theorizing, confi-
dent claims about aesthetic value seem problematic. Once we recog-
nize how much pressure the market in contemporary art produces,
it is to natural to be skeptical about critics' claims. In the art market,
there is grade inflation.
Richard Wollheim, whose experience of old master art is very
rich, speaks of "the genius of de Kooning and Rothko," admires
Hans Hofmann and David Smith, and praises Pollock, Joseph Cor-
nell, Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Fairfield Porter, Louise Bourgeois,
and Wayne Thiebold. But on the whole, he is skeptical about the
claims of American critics.8
I do not believe that history will treat New York as the Venice, or the
Paris, or the Florence, of the second half of the twentieth century. . . .
The scene is too overcrowded with figures who tried to get into the
history without contributing to the art.
Eighteenth-century Florence had painters who were admired then

but who no longer attract attention. New York also will suffer this
fate.
Those of us involved with the New York artworld may be sur-
prised at Wollheim's judgments. But we too know how difficult it is
to be confident in evaluating near contemporaries. When we get to
Krauss's generation, there is almost no painter or sculptor, photogra-
pher or installation artist whose reputation is entirely secure. Like
antique dealers and used car salespeople, art dealers sell objects
whose value is determined by consensus about their rarity and resale
value. But unlike antiques or automobiles, artworks are accompa-
22 Rosalind Krauss
nied by theorizing. Contemporary art is collected in depth by Ameri-

can museums. Midcareer artists have museum exhibitions, and
famous senior figures receive numerous full-scale retrospectives.
Many collectors and museums support a large market in contempo-
rary art. But the art audience is not, on the whole, sophisticated. Ev-
eryone at a P i t t s b u r g h Pirates game k n o w s the rules of
baseball—and most spectators evaluate the players, comparing
them with their precursors. Few people ask, "Why are there three
bases?" or "How many swings does that man at home plate get?" At
the movies or pop concerts, similarly, almost everyone has informed
opinions. Popular culture is highly accessible. You don't need to
study academic film theory to judge Hollywood movies. In the mu-
seum, by contrast, despite the efforts of art educators, most specta-
tors have surprisingly little knowledge of what they are seeing.9
Traditional art mostly was made for an elite. Modernist mass cul-
ture makes possible political protest art, which seeks to analyze criti-
cally the ruling elite. Moralists believed that good art might make
the viewer a better person. Marxist philosophical art critics agreed,
and gave this idea a novel twist—art should call attention to social
injustices. In 1976 the editors of October wrote:10
We have named this journal in celebration of that moment in our cen-

tury when revolutionary practice, theoretical inquiry and artistic in-
novation were joined in a manner exemplary and unicjue. For the
artists of that time and place, literature, painting, architecture, film re-
quired and generated their own Octobers.
The Russian avant-garde artists who supported the 1917 October

revolution were destroyed by Stalin. In 1917, as also in the 1960s and
1970s, the connection between revolutionary art and politics was rel-
atively loose. Like some Americans of Krauss's era, the Russian art-
ists of 1917 wanted to make politically effective art. But work done in
Paris, and not Russian avant-garde, was the most significant artisti-
cally revolutionary art.11 October identifies its political interests with
its title. October's "October" is the Eisenstein movie, not the
Bolshevik revolution. But because that movie depicts the Bolshevik
revolution, this distinction is a little subtle. In 1987, the editors
claimed:12
We have no desire to perpetuate the mythology of the revolution.

Rather we wished to claim that the unfinished, analytic project of
constructivism . . . was required for a consideration of the aesthetic

practices of our own time.
It is not constructivism, but cubism, semiotics, and surrealism that

have been Krauss's central concerns in recent years. O n the cover of
October appear the words: " A r t / T h e o r y / C r i t i c i s m / P o l i t i c s . "
Throughout Krauss's career, analyzing critically links between art
a n d money, a n d art a n d morality, h a s b e e n i m p o r t a n t . Like
Greenberg, she—while hesitating for the most part to publicly a d o p t
partisan positions—has supported left-wing ways of thinking. "It is
Eisenstein's most basic assumption," she has written, " t h a t . . . all art
. . . is fundamentally ideological." 13
Krauss argues that although "for certain works of m o d e r n a r t . . .
esthetic content is tied to the function of the community . . . they are
about the act of delectation and possession and nothing more," in
early Abstract Expression; in the work of Rauschenberg and Johns,
there w a s "an attempt to renounce this function." 14 Rauschenberg,
she observes, employs quite banal things and images. The artwork
might thus "challenge its fate of being absorbed as a commodity
only." This political w a y of thinking is exemplified in the format of
October.15
October will be plain of aspect, its illustrations determined by consid-

erations of textual quality These decisions follow from a fundamental
choice as to the primacy of text and the writer's freedom of discourse.
As Thomas Crow, w h o publishes in October, has observed, 1 6
what is lost in that approach is the opportunity for the text and visual
reproduction to function on anything like equal terms. . . . in the ab-
sence of the assertive, large-scale illustration provided by a magazine
like Artforum, it can be too easy to speak of the visual without speak-
ing to it.
Color illustrations are expensive, and so art journals using them

are d e p e n d e n t on advertisers. Artforum occasionally has hostile re-
views, but an overly critical journal would lose its commercial sup-
porters. October's format allows the journal to present more
intellectual debate than Artforum. Like its political opposite, Hilton
Kramer's The New Criterion, which has no illustrations, October can
afford to withdraw from the commercial artworld.17 Because
Rauschenberg was, as Krauss says, "entirely original," it should not
24 Rosalind Krauss
be unexpected that his art and Johns's—and not the work of their
less original contemporaries—became extremely valuable. The art
market, like other capitalist markets, rewards inventiveness. In the
1970s, it was possible to expect that art in some future socialist soci-
ety would escape comodification. Today that expectation looks
much less promising.
Revolutions sometimes inspire political art. Imagine a French
aristocrat who in 1785 sees Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the
Horatii.™ That narrative of a historically distant Roman conflict be-
tween public duty and family loyalty becomes by 1789 a picture
about the present. Informed by the painting, that man comes to
care more about the interests of France than his family. Never be-
fore having seen how dramatic such conflicts are, or how they
might be resolved, he becomes a different person. His view of duty
changed, he acts differently. At least, this is what believers in polit-
ical art would like to imagine. Even so, a variety of responses to
David's art are imaginable. David's The Lictors Returning to Brutus
the Bodies of His Sons (1789) shows the brooding father below the
body of his son—another lesson in virtue. A man might identify
with Brutus and learn to serve the state, whatever the cost to his
family. But someone might look rather to the group of women at
the right mourning the brother who died. This viewer might then
draw a rather different lesson—he might see the picture as show-
ing the problems of masculine morality and the wicked absurdity
of political judgments that take too little account of the intrinsic
value of individuals.
How plausible is the belief that politically critical art might im-
prove the viewer? "Recent art history," Whitney Davis writes,
"holds that subjects—human individuals with personal, ethnic, and
other identities, well-defined social roles, and at least partial con-
sciousness of specific orientations toward the world of objects and
other subjects—are constructed in relation to works of art."19 This
view may be plausible, he allows, when, for example, early experi-
ence of homoerotic images "contribute to the formation of a homo-
erotic subject." But the belief that adults are changed in any serious
way by "attending a Salon, reading an illustrated magazine or going
to a museum" is implausible. Maybe children who grow seeing gay
or leftist images are less likely to be homophobic conservatives than
they would be otherwise, but that adults change because they see a
picture is highly unlikely. Once our character is formed, massive
changes in erotic preferences or political ideals require correspond-
ingly dramatic causes. The Buddha, a very sheltered child, changed

because he saw aging and death. But in our culture homosexuality is
discussed on television. No one could remain very sheltered, even if
they wished. Few visitors to the recent Whitney Biennales object to
the political art on display there.20 Even if they did, would momen-
tary exposure to such art change their political beliefs?
Most Americans think it important that children not grow up
with homophobic, racist, or sexist books, movies, or television
shows. We believe that nasty images of gay people, minorities, or
women deform children's ways of thinking. And we believe that no
one, neither children nor adult authority figures, who makes homo-
phobic, racist, or sexist remarks should be unchallenged. When peo-
ple are permitted to speak publicly in racist ways, then the mistaken
impression is given that such ways of thinking are acceptable. In
practice, of course, this ideal is very far from being always achieved.
But that it is a norm is significant, for that influences how people
speak and think in private. Racists, sexists, and other bigots are gen-
erally felt to be abnormal, if not (when they hold extreme view's)
"crazy." The culture people grow up with affects their moral views.
The art they see when adults mostly does not.
Championing Richard Serra, Douglas Crimp argues that21
it is not in the interests of the institutions of art and the forces they
serve to produce knowledge of radical practices even for their spe-
cialized audience.... Such practices attempted to reveal the material
conditions of the work of art, its mode of production, and reception,
the institutional supports of its circulation, the power relations repre-
sented by these institutions.
Published in a catalog of the Museum of Modern Art, New York,

these claims are self-contradictory. If it is not in the interest of muse-
ums to promote such awareness, then why do they show7 Serra?
When viewing Serra's Tilted Arc, Crimp claims, we learn that "inso-
far as our society is fundamentally constructed upon the principle of
egotism, the needs of each individual coming into conflict with
those of all other individuals, Serra's work does nothing other than
present us with the truth of our social condition."22 Few New York-
ers are unaware of the importance of egoism or, what Crimp does
not take up, how city life depends also on cooperation.23 Everyone
knows that contemporary works by famous artists are expensive
commodities and that the very rich rule our museums. The prob-
26 Rosalind Krauss
lems inherent in Crimp's role as radical critic are apparent in the ac-
knowledgments to his excellent book On the Museum's Ruins. Fie
thanks the "many museums, art schools, and universities" where he
lectured, and the National Gallery, the National Endowment for the
Arts, and the Getty Grant Program for support. Crimp, an important
critic, deserves this recognition. Of course this does not satisfy him.
Why indeed should he be satisfied when often even relatively privi-
leged gay people are often badly treated? Crimp's well-deserved
success puts him in an impossible position. He seeks to be a radical
critic of the museum, but the function of his writing is to promote
Serra.
Attempting to preserve Tilted Arc, Richard Serra appealed to legal
reasoning.24 His government, he argued, has an obligation to respect
his rights. As Crow, Serra's supporter, observes, "the trap that he cre-
ated for himself was that, had his suit been successful, Tilted Arc
would have become a permanent monument to the virtues of the
American judicial system— its survival would have entailed an im-
plicit contradiction of his intellectual premises." 25 Crimp and Crow
observe how the hearings against Tilted Arc were manipulated by
Serra's enemies, but they don't deal with the obvious fact that this
sculpture was unpopular. Like almost all serious contemporary vi-
sual art, Serra's is esoteric. The conservative view that Crow pres-
ents, that Tilted Arc is "the product of an entrenched, self-interested
minority culture brutally indifferent to the needs of the average indi-
vidual," is essentially true. Setting down a large expensive sculp-
ture, not commissioned in open competition, defending it in prose
the public finds incomprehensible, was to ask for trouble. You only
need read Krauss's public statement in support of Serra to realize
how little of a populist she is:26
The kind of vector Tilted Arc explores is that of vision, more specifi-
cally what it means for vision to be invested with a purpose.. .. this
sculpture is constantly mapping a kind of projectile of the gaze that
starts at one end of Federal Plaza and, like the embodiment of the con-
cept of visual perspective, maps the path across the plaza that specta-
tor will take.
As Crow notes, she speaks as if to a seminar. It is too late when in her

last sentence, Krauss says, magnificently, "In the beauty of its doing
this, Tilted Arc establishes itself as a great work of art." And yet,
Krauss's account could be used in a populist way. Unlike some pub-
lie figurative sculpture, which only those knowledgeable about ico-

nography can understand, Serra's essentially democratic work is
accessible to anyone with eyes to see. Had Tilted Arc's defenders
better explained the work, it might have become popular.
C o m p a r e d with the activist critics of October, Krauss has a
nuanced view of the possibilities of political art. 27
While the artist might be creating a Utopian alternative to, or com-

pensation for, a certain nightmare induced by industrialization or
comodification, he is at the very same time projecting an imaginary
space which, if it is shaped somehow by the structural features of that
same nightmare, works to produce the possibility for its receiver
fictively to occupy the territory of what will be a next, more advanced
level of capital.
This argument too is questionable. Is the good critical artist ahead of

his time? Serra, the surrealist photographers, a n d most of the other
figures Krauss has championed are very m u c h of their time.
When in the late 1960s Krauss was publishing in Artforum, for-
malism remained very powerful. Michael Fried wrote commentar-
ies on Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella. Krauss
discussed David Smith, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock's
drawings. "My knowledge of modernist painting and sculpture,"
she wrote in 1971, "was developed largely through the critical essays
of, and discussions with, Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. . . I
am deeply grateful to . . . Greenberg, w r ho . . . as a friend, helped the
present work come into being." 2 8 Soon enough she w o u l d speak dif-
ferently, but in her early criticism, Greenberg w a s very influential. 29
[Morris] Louis embedded the release of color within a surface that

was mural-like, that was oriented to the wall in terms of its continuity
and its resistance to being bounded.... The rhythmic momentum of
mural-art or wall-decoration naturally resists centralization and the
relationships between perimeter and centre that constitute the easel
picture.
She uses Greenberg's concept of "all-over" or decentralized compo-

sition. In Le Corbusier's cubist paintings, she argued, "pictorial
space is that which cannot be entered or circulated through; it is irre-
mediably space viewed from a distance, and is therefore eternally
resigned to frontality." 30
28 Rosalind Krauss
Terminal Iron Works begins discussing recent attacks on formal-

ism. Soon Krauss too w o u l d be a m o n g those critics. In the 1960s, the
color field painters were identified by Greenberg as the natural heirs
to the Abstract Expressionists. Krauss also s u p p o r t e d them: 31
Because Pollock's line never registers objects which one imagines one
could touch but rather creates a space available only to vision, Pollock
was the first to usher the viewer into what has been called an optical
space.
[Jules] Olitski's art makes it possible to see how different the kind of
opticality achieved by Pollock was from that achieved by Newman.
The color cannot inform or make sensible the literal place of the pic-
ture. This is precisely what color in Olitski's art can, and does, do.
In Smith's sculpture, similarly, "the surface makes the work visually

accessible, while defeating the desire for possession by touch." 3 2 But
already in Terminal Iron Works different concerns emerge—surreal-
ism and totems. Looking back, Terminal Iron Works appears an uneasy
synthesis. Krauss's experience at Artforum "with John Coplans and
Robert Pincus-Witten" then dramatically changed her interests. 33
Jasper Johns's mid-1970s paintings, Krauss wrote, "convey an ex-
traordinary sense of the a u t o n o m y of the visual. The a u t o n o m y of
the voice is the ironist's last source of value." 3 4 Greenberg did not
m u c h admire Johns, but here Krauss remains u n d e r the spell of
modernist ways of thinking. In a 1968 catalog essay, Fried spoke of
"the difficulty of conceiving of a space to which eyesight gives ac-
cess b u t which somehow denies even the possibility of literal pene-
tration of it by the beholder," 3 5 Fie alludes to Heinrich Wolfflin's
distinction between linear sixteenth-century art, where w h a t w e see
depicted is w h a t w e can also imagine touching, and baroque paint-
erly representation that "has its roots only in the eye a n d appeals
only to the eye . . . just as the child ceases to take hold of things in or-
der to 'grasp' them, so mankind has ceased to test the picture for its
tactile values. A more developed art has learned to surrender itself
to mere appearance." 3 6 Wolfflin distinguished two forms of repre-
sentation; Krauss and Fried identify different w a y s in which paint-
ers open u p abstract illusionistic space. Krauss makes distinctions of
detail between her claims and those of Greenberg a n d Fried, while
accepting the basic formalist framework.
Krauss's break with Greenberg involved a very public dispute
about the David Smith estate. It is no accident that they argued about
economic issues, for critics of Krauss's generation had become very

suspicious of Greenberg's role in the art market. Judging just by the
published information, the issues were more complex than either
side indicated.37 Because there is a tendency to reject Greenberg's
claims out of hand, this point is worth spelling out. Smith left some
sculptures with only primer. When Greenberg had that paint re-
moved, it was possible to understand his action in two ways.
Greenberg removed paint that Smith applied. But insofar as the
primer supplied no guide to the final intended color, that paint was
not an essential to Smith's artwork. (So far as I know, Greenberg did
not remove final paint applied by the sculptor.38) Greenberg claimed
that "the question of color in Smith's art. . . remains a vexed one. I
don't think he has ever used applied color with real success."39 And
Krauss wrote, "Smith was willing to conceded that the color he ap-
plied to the surfaces of his earlier work was largely arbitrary and al-
most never really successful."40
Might the unfinished works painted only with primer have been
destroyed? When Smith's became valuable, this was unlikely.
Krauss writes, "I feel that there are no justifiable grounds for altering
the work of an artist after his . . . death."41 But this is not exactly the
situation. Smith did not choose the color of these sculptures. Krauss
needed a pretext to rebel against a mentor whose era was passed.
Looking back, it would have been more honest to separate herself
from him over some matter of principle (of which there were
plenty)—and not over this point of detail. But when personal rela-
tionships fail, people generally behave in irrational ways. This argu-
ment about David Smith became the basis for settling long
simmering disputes. In a review, Krauss made Greenberg the target:
"Caro seems to me an example of an artist who has been rather badly
derailed by paying close attention to the terminology used by ad-
miring critics to forward his work."42 Greenberg's positivism, she
says, is not the best way to understand Caro's achievement. In her
next book, she developed an alternative to Greenberg's theorizing.
NOTES
1. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A
Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981),
p. 208.
2. See my Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1987); and Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary
30 Rosalind Krauss
Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1997).
3. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Los An-
geles, CA: Art Issues Press, 1997), p. 111.
4. Columns & Catalogues (Great Barrington, MA: Figures, 1994),
p. 237.
5. "Eva Hesse," in Eva Hesse: Sculpture (London: Whitechapel
Art Gallery, 1979), n.p.
6. On the history of the art market, see Krzysztof Pomian, Col-
lectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800, trans. Elizabeth
Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
7. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron
Padgett (New York: Viking, 1971), p. 16.
8. Richard Wollheim, "Danto's Gallery of Indiscernables," in
Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),
p. 37.
9. See my "Teaching the New Art History," in The History of Art
Education: Proceedings from the Second Perm State Conference, eds. P.
Ambury, D. Soucy, M.A. Stankiewicz, B. Wilson, and M. Wilson
(Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, 1991), pp. 65-92.
10. The editors, "about OCTOBER," October 1 (1976): 3. Jeremy
Gilbert-Rolfe, a founding editor, discussed this occasion in his Be-
yond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986-1993 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 361 n. 22. See Stephen Bann's
review (October: The First Decade and Brian Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke,
Word & Image 4, 3-4 [July-December 1988]: 746-748) and Noel
Carroll, "Illusions of Postmodernism," Raritan 7, 2 (fall 1987):
143-155.
11. See my "Art Criticism and the Death of Marxism," Leonardo,
30, 3 (1997): 241-245.
12. Annette Michelson, Douglas Crimp, and Joan Copjec, "Intro-
duction," October: The First Decade, 1976-1986 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1987), ix.
Viking Press, 1977), p. 9.
14. "Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image," Artforum (De-
cember 1974): 38.
15. "About OCTOBER," October 1 (1976): 5.
16. Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Ha-
ven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 88.
17. Even a small circulation publication requires patrons. The

summer 1996 October acknowledges "generous support" from
Marian Goodman (Gerhard Richter's American dealer), Roy
Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, and Leo Castelli, art-
ists (and dealers of artists) championed by October.
18. See Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-
Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); and
my "Was David a Revolutionary before the Revolution?: Recent
Political Readings of Oath of the Horatii and The Lictors Returning to
Brutus the Bodies of His Sons/' forthcoming in an anthology on Da-
vid edited by Dorothy Johnson.
19. Whitney Davis, "The Subject in the Scene of Representa-
tion," Art Bulletin 71, 4 (December 1994): 570.
20. See my "New York. Whitney Biennial," Burlington Magazine
(June 1995): 409-410.
21. In Rosalind E. Krauss, in Richard Serra/Sculpture, ed. Laura
Rosenstock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), p. 42.
22. Ibid., p. 53.
23. An earlier version of this argument appears in my "Art Criti-
cism and Its Beguiling Fictions," Artlnternational, 9 (winter 1989):
36-41.
24. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, ed. Clara
Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1991).
25. Crow, Modern Art, pp. 149-150.
26. "(Statement)," The Destruction of Tilted Arc, p. 82.
27. "The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum," October
54 (fall 1990): 11.
28. Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of Da-
vid Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), vii.
29. "Introduction," Morris Louis, exhibition catalog (Auckland:
1971), n.p.
30. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Leger, Le Corbusier, and Purism,"
Artforum (April 1972): 52.
31. "Jules Olitski," in Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings (Institute for
Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, and Hayden Gal-
lery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968), n.p.
32. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, p. 89.
33. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, vi.
34. "Jasper Johns: The Functions of Irony," October 2 (summer
1976): 98.
32 Rosalind Krauss
35. Three American Painters (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum,

1965), p. 21.
36. Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the
Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York:
Dover, n.d), p. 21.
37. See my Principles of Art History Writing (University Park, PA:
Penn State Press, 1991), pp. 24-25.
38. Some of Smith's sculptures were left outside in winter—a
photograph in Terminal Iron Works shows snow piled on Cube To-
tem. If the painted sculptures also were set out of doors, that would
suggest that their paint was relatively unimportant to Smith.
39. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol-
ume 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John O'Brian
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 192.
40. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, p. 170. In a footnote she quotes
Smith: "I've only made two sculptures in tune properly between
color and shape."
41. Letters, Joseph W. Henderson, with reply, Art in America
(March-April 1978): 136.
42. "How Paradigmatic Is Anthony Caro," Art in America (Sep-
tember-October 1975): 83.
CHAPTER 2
The Structuralist
Adventure
The semiotic square usually imposed an initial structure on a narra-

tive ... anything could be put in the four corners of the square without
any verification whatsoever. . . Within the semiotic square, the empiri-
cal world and the referent could be kept at bay.
Francois Dosse
The key figure in the revolt against Greenberg was Leo Steinberg, for
he provided the best argument against formalism and linked that ar-
gument to the best artists corning after Abstract Expressionism. His
lecture "Other Criteria," Krauss rightly wrote in 1988, "announced
the advent of 'post-modernism/" 1 Krauss is a follower of
Steinberg—she often acknowledges his influence. Speaking of
Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Warhol, Steinberg asserts, "the
all-purpose picture plane underlying this post-Modernist painting
has made the course of art once again non-linear and unpredict-
able."2 The relationship of artwork and spectator had changed.
Greenberg said, "Nothing could be further from the authentic art of
our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is ... continuity,
and unthinkable without it."3 Steinberg disagreed, and his way of
thinking soon was generally accepted.
Greenberg argues that the history of modernist painting is inau-
gurated by Manet's preserving-anci-breaking-with old master tradi-
34 Rosalind Krauss
tion. Krauss says that the history of modernist sculpture beginning

with Rodin involves a decisive break with tradition. What assertion
of Greenberg is being denied by Krauss? If Krauss a n d Steinberg
were right, then the artists championed by Greenberg were too tra-
ditional to be significant. Passages in Modern Sculpture argues that
m o d e r n i s m began with Rodin. His sculptures fail to present a visual
narrative. In failing "to relate . . . the o u t w a r d appearance of the
b o d y to its inner structure," he " p r o d u c e d an art intensely hostile to
rationalism." 4 Rodin's figure groupings d o not present narratives;
his individual figures are not expressive.
Krauss's characterization of Rodin's achievement is essentially
negative. Tim Clark has asserted, and Michael Fried has denied,
"that the practices of m o d e r n i s m in the arts are fundamentally prac-
tices of negation." 5 Does a marxist concern with negation give a just
image of the achievements of m o d e r n i s m ? Krauss's emphasis on
n e g a t i v i t y in m o d e r n i s t s c u l p t u r e signals her revolt a g a i n s t
Greenberg. When, by contrast, Fried insisted that high modernist
abstraction was not fundamentally concerned with negation, he re-
mained closer to Greenberg. By not presenting a narrative and not
showing the b o d y ' s structure, Krauss's Rodin negates w h a t came
earlier. Greenberg, by contrast, argues that Roclin both does some-
thing n e w and builds u p o n tradition: 6
Rodin was the first sculptor who actually tried to catch up with paint-
ing,, dissolving stone forms into light and air in search of effects analo-
gous to those of impressionist painting. He was a great artist, but he
destroyed his tradition.
His art . . . was fulfilled in itself and in the revival of monolithic

sculpture that it initiated.
Passages characterizes m a n y very different sculptures in these

negative terms. 7
Duchamp's strategy has been to present a work {Fountain) which is ir-

reducible under formal analysis, wrhich is detached from his own per-
sonal feelings.
Because of its actual disjunction from the body that lies behind it, the
mask functions i n . . . [Picasso Head of a Woman, 1931] as a denial of the
classical principle which holds that the surface of a form is the exter-
nal effect of an underlying cause.
The Structuralist Adventure 35
The idea that they were not fabricated by the artist but were made in-
stead for some other use within society at large—constructing build-
ings—gives to those elements [Carl Andre, Lever, 1966] a natural
opacity.
Johns's Target or Ale Cans, in negating the internality of the ab-

stract-expressionist picture, simultaneously rejects the innerness of
its space and the privacy of the self for which that space was a model.
Richard Serra's One-Ton Prop (House of Cards)... continues the protest

... against sculpture as a metaphor for a body divided into inside and
outside.
As Gombrich's The Story of Art describes paintings by Giotto,

Masaccio, and Manet as illusionistic, so Krauss identifies these very
different looking sculptures in the same way: like a Rodin, they are
not meaningful because they are not representing the body.
A traditional sculpture is like a person. As a person's inner states
are expressed outwardly by their body, so a sculpture displays an ex-
pressive surface. This analogy is easiest to grasp w h e n sculpture de-
picts h u m a n bodies, but it also applies to abstract art. Krauss says
that Mark di Suvero creates three-dimensional versions of Abstract
Expressionist paintings. "A beam thrusts; a piece of iron follows a
gesture; together they form a naturalistic and anthropomorphic im-
age." 8 Like Rodin's figurative sculpture, the video art of Bruce
N a u m a n , the minimalism of Serra and Carl Andre, and the earth-
works of Robert Smithson all turn away from o u t w a r d expression of
what is inward to concern with surfaces. Even in this radical nega-
tion, something is preserved. The subject of this art is the b o d y and
our experience of it. In Greenberg's theory of modernist painting,
w h a t is essential is h o w the m e d i u m is used, and not whether art is
figurative or abstract. Similarly, for Krauss w h a t matters is how
these meanings are expressed. W h e n w e get to her near contempo-
raries, "the transformation of sculpture—from a static, idealized
m e d i u m to a temporal and material one—that h a d begun with Ro-
din is fully achieved." 9 Rodin's figures m a y look like Michelan-
gelo's, and very unlike Smithson's Spiral jetty, but if Krauss's
account can be accepted, these different looking artworks by Rodin
and Smithson seem similar. Because she thus achieves narrative clo-
sure, identifying Smithson as finishing a project b e g u n by Rodin,
w h a t could come next? Only her next book, The Originality of the
Avant-Garde, answers this question.
36 Rosalind Krauss
Krauss's modernist tradition in sculpture starts earlier than

Steinberg's postmodernism. Where Steinberg finds a serious histori-
cal break in the 1960s, Krauss identifies continuity from Rodin
through to the advanced art of the 1970s. Under one description,
postmodernism starts in the 1960s; under another, it does not. Some
artists Krauss discusses—Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol—appear
also in "Other Criteria." Steinberg focuses on painting and Krauss
discusses sculpture, which defines some of their differences, but
does not explain why they think about history differently. "Since
sculpture itself offered few models," she argued, "the Minimalists
looked sometimes to architecture, but more crucially to painting." 10
If, as narratologists argue, narrative structures are literary artifacts,
structures of texts and not the world, then writers can legitimately
describe art's history differently. The Originality (1985) says that a
group of sculptors working around 1968 to 1970 "had entered a situ-
ation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as
modernist. In order to name this historical rupture... one must have
recourse to another term. The one already in use in other areas of
criticism is postmodernism. There seems no reason not to use it."11
She gives a different date for the break than Steinberg, describes the
break differently, and associates it with different artists. Krauss calls
Steinberg's 1963 essay "Rodin" a decisive influence, but his concerns
are different. Steinberg's Rodin is a brilliantly innovative employer
of tradition. "Rodin" neither discusses the modernist sculptors dis-
cussed in Passages, apart from a brief mention of Brancusi, nor links
Rodin to the postmodernists of "Other Criteria."12
Perhaps Rodin's ultimate significance for our time is simply that he

turned the direction of sculpture around. Nineteenth-century sculp-
ture was... dedicated chiefly to conventional communal goals. Rodin
restored to imvard experience what had been for at least a century a
branch of public relations.
Steinberg's Rodin is quite different from Krauss's.

In the most interesting modernist sculpture, Krauss argues,
meaning is "seen as arising from . . . a public, rather than a private
space," as, in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, linguistic meanings
are given not by internal experiences but publicly by behavior.13 Art-
ists who "insisted on making work that would refuse the unique-
ness, privacy, and inaccessibility of experience" employed
Wittgenstein's argument against a private language. Meaning of art
is given in public ways in "what might be called cultural space." The

sculptural language Krauss describes became the dominant lan-
guage of the modern artworld. Modernist sculptures are meaning-
ful because like sentences, they make statements, as when, for
example, Richard Serra made House of Cards by balancing four
500-pound plates of lead against each another, in contact only at
their upper corners. Language combines words into sentences, as
the sculptor combines physical elements into the artwork, hence the
subtitle of the last chapter of Passages—"a new syntax for sculpture."
That the sculptures of Anthony Caro are constructed of assembled
autonomous elements makes this comparison tempting.
This analogy between linguistic and sculptural meaning cannot
go very far. Native speakers make and understand statements, but
usually only sculptors make sculptures. To make her analogy plau-
sible, Krauss would need to imagine a meaningful language that
most people understand but cannot speak. The linguist and the
scholar of modernist sculpture have different goals. Krauss explains
the history of this art form from Rodin to Serra. A linguist, by con-
trast, can analyze the present uses of language without examining
its history. Soon Krauss will take up this problem, translating
diachronic analysis into atemporal terms to present the historical
development of sculpture in a diagram. The history from Rodin to
Smithson is the story of the development of artworks that do not ex-
press outwardly an inner structure, and so do not present a narra-
tive. Her next major book, The Originality oftheAvant-Garde, presents
a very different view of art's temporal development.
When an original thinker changes her ways of thinking dramati-
cally, do her new arguments develop continuously out of the old
ones, or does she need to break with her past? How, after rejecting
the developmental narrative of Passages in Modern Sculpture, did
Krauss turn to structuralist theorizing? Passages offers an alternative
to Greenberg's account of modernism. Focused on sculpture, not
painting, unlike Art and Culture her book does not use a formalist
narrative; according to Passages, understanding the content of sculp-
ture is essential. By the 1970s, it became apparent that any mere tam-
pering with Greenberg's account was insufficiently radical to
command attention. Leo Steinberg called for new criteria, for the
best new art had broken with the past. Passages dealt sympatheti-
cally with Mel Bochner, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson, figures
very different from David Smith, the sculptor associated closely by
Greenberg with Abstract Expressionism. Giving a major place to
38 Rosalind Krauss
Smith, Krauss described him in postformalist terms. Fler Smith is

different from Greenberg's. But although Passages presented a
postformalist analysis, in retrospect that account seems close to
Greenberg's. The next step came when Krauss developed a
nonnarrative way of thinking about art history. "In sequence mak-
ing," Philip Fisher notes, "we domesticate novelty. The choice to see
the new fact, at least provisionally, as no more than a variant of de-
velopment of a familiar range of facts without only certain differ-
ences is a profoundly conservative habit."14 Krauss breaks with this
conservatism. When Frank Stella worked in series, she suggested in
197V5
the image no longer contains the terms of its past—understood as the

terms of the problem to which it is seen to be a response. Rather, both
the past and the problem are felt to reside outside it, and access to
them can only be achieved by a long chain of explanation which char-
acteristically takes the form of narrative.
Here, in ways that only became clear later, she anticipated

structuralist ways of thinking.
In the 1960s there was much interest in structuralism among liter-
ary critics, and some tentative attempts to apply it to visual art. In
1966 Sheldon Nodelman drew attention to the writings of Claude
Levi-Strauss, and to some earlier, untranslated German literature.16
Neither Levi-Strauss nor the other well-known figures associated
with structuralism were centrally concerned with visual art. And so
a major creative effort was required to identify ways of applying
their ways of thinking to visual art. What would it mean to speak of a
structure in modernist art? Levi-Strauss, primarily interested in cul-
tures outside of history, did not discuss this issue.17 The Originality of
the Avant-Garde developed a highly original way of applying
structuralist theorizing to contemporary art. Krauss does not say
much about premodern art. Like Art and Culture, her book, focused
on contemporary art and its early modernist precedents, only hints
at historical analysis.
Just as Krauss's first deeply individual creative work was pro-
voked by her break with Greenbergian formalism, so the title essay
of her second full book, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, originated
in a dispute with another senior figure, the Rodin scholar Albert
Elsen. Both disputes concern art and commerce. In Passages, Krauss
describes Gates of Hell without mentioning Elsen. Initially Rodin
made a traditional sculpture, but "in its final version the Gates of Hell
resists all attempts to be read as a coherent narrative." 18 In his re-
view, Elsen objected to her attempt to "make Rodin a founding
formalist and the Gates of Hell into a formalist exercise of 'opacity'
and self-referral."19 Krauss sets Rodin into a history of modernist
sculpture very different from Elsen's, and so, not surprisingly, he
found her account of Rodin unsympathetic. 20
The 1981 Rodin catalog for the National Gallery, Washington, by
Elsen and other experts asks: Is Gates of Hell finished? Is the bronze in
exhibition, cast in 1978, an original Rodin?21 Rodin had a plaster cast
made in 1900, did not change the sculpture, and died in 1917. This
work, very expensive to cast, was owned by the French government,
which took possession after his death. Rodin often thought of his art
as unfinished; in 1904, an inspector reported that Rodin expected to
make further changes. Because the sculpture was paid for, but could
not be set in its site, as originally planned, Rodin had no incentive to
make changes. Gates of Hell does not look obviously unfinished, but
it contains many individual sculptures such as The Thinker, which
could be positioned differently. Elsen plausibly called Gates of Hell
"completebut not finished."22 Copies of Rodins are a sensitive issue,
for bad replicas were one cavise of the long posthumous eclipse of his
reputation. Gates of Hell was cast only a decade after his death. Dur-
ing his lifetime, he supervised his more important castings, working
with a trusted assistant. Many of his sculptures were intended to be
copied. He gave to the French nation rights to reproduce his art, and
decisions were made by committee about the permitted number of
authentic casts. Usually there is an intimate relation between a per-
son's intentions and their actions. Rodin did not permit assistants to
conceive and execute a sculpture, acting in his name. Generally he
left the making bronzes of his sculptures to assistants. Relinquishing
rights of copying Gates of Hell, he had no explicit thoughts—that is,
no intentions—about how many copies should be made.
Here, as in the argument about Greenberg's removal of primer
from unfinished David Smiths, complex questions are generated by
practical concerns. Were the unfinished Smiths or the posthumous
cast of Gates of Hell not genuine, they would have no economic value.
If the problematic Smiths are "only one per cent of the estate's hold-
ings at the time of Smith's death," Krauss suggests, "one course of
action would have been to withdraw that small body of work from
the market." 23 But the sculptures were very valuable, so that was
unlikely to happen. Rodin left to the state a plaster version of an enor-
40 Rosalind Krauss
mous, important sculpture. Had he been forgotten, that cast would

have been discarded. But when, after his reputation was long in
eclipse, he again became famous, Gates of Hell was cast. When valu-
able paintings are damaged, museums feel pressure to made them
presentable for exhibition.24 Similarly, whether Rodin thought Gates
of Hell definitively finished, his cast permits making very complete-
looking artworks.
Many 1960s artists sought to undermine or move outside the mar-
ket system.25 Krauss's critique of Elsen builds upon that concern. Ac-
cepting, in effect, most of Elsen's legal and historical arguments,
Krauss wants to open up discussion. "We do not care if the copyright
papers are all in order; for what is at stake are the aesthetic rights of
style based on a culture of originals." 26 She uses this example to mo-
tivate discussion of authenticity and originality.27 Style, she else-
where has said, is "a category born of idealism . . . a fundamentally
nonhistorical way of thinking." 28 She does not suggest that Gates of
Hell be discarded. The Originality of the Avant-Garde moves beyond
modernism. Part one, "Modernist Myths," is followed by part two,
"Toward Postmodernism." Gates of Hell provides the staging point
for questions taken up by Rodin's postmodernist successors. Krauss
links Rodin to Walter Benjamin's much discussed essay on art in the
age of mechanical reproduction, to grids in modernist painting, to
Jane Austen's accounts of picturesque landscapes, and to Roland
Barthes on realism and Sherrie Levine's playful undermining of tra-
ditional ideals of artistic originality.29 This virtuoso performance,
which frequently changes focus, has little to say about Rodin. "The
absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection
emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but—more impor-
tantly—its hostility to narrative." 30 Krauss describes a structuralist
model for describing contemporary art. She found in Elsen's exhibi-
tion the pretext for moving her own argument forward. The result
was brilliant, even if the means employed are oddly arbitrary.
Teachers of logic will recognize that Krauss's Greimas
structuralist diagrams derive from the "Square of Opposition." 31 For
example, the four statements:32
A All republics are ungrateful

E No republics are ungrateful
I Some republics are ungrateful
O Some republics are not ungrateful
define the chart:
A E
I O
The relations between propositions permits determining truth val-

ues of assertions.33 If E is true, A is false, and so on. As used by
Greimas or literary critics such diagrams have at most a metaphori-
cal significance. When, to quote Fredric Jameson's sympathetic
commentary, Greimas seeks "to articulate any apparently static
free-standing concept or term into that binary opposition which it
structurally presupposes and which forms the very basis for its in-
telligibility," he would show the structures of the world.34 The
"Square of Opposition" displays "the logical structure . . . which is
obscured by the unwieldiness of ordinary language." 35 But when
Jameson writes36
Ancien Regime Energy

Culture Bourgeoisie
then the bourgeoisie is not the opposite of the Ancien Regime, nor en-
ergy its contrary, the opposite of culture. From this juxtaposition of
names, not propositions, there is no legitimate way to infer logical
relationships. Jameson merely diagrams his interpretation of the
French novel's development.
Similarly, when Krauss explains Giacometti's sculpture with the
diagram
figure ground
grid gestalt
she is only juxtaposing in one of many possible ways those four con-
cepts. There are no logical relationships here, and so nothing can be
inferred from the diagram, suggestive though it may be. With inge-
nuity, any four words can be set in such a diagram. Consider, for ex-
ample, my Greimas diagram of modernism:
Formalism Antistructuralism
(Greenberg) (Michael Fried)
Antistructuralist Antiformalism Structuralist Antiformalism
(Arthur Danto) (Krauss)
42 Rosalind Krauss
It " m a k e s " some true statements: Krauss is opposed to Greenberg;

Fried's ideas are different than Greenberg's; Danto is not a formalist.
But it also suggests false claims—for example, that these are the only
four possible views of modernism. 3 7
Greimas diagrams translate temporal narratives into spatial rela-
tionships. In Jameson's account of Balzac's Ea Vieille Fille or Joseph
Conrad's Eord Jim, a story is interpreted. The Square of Opposition
has explanatory power—from the truth value of one proposition,
that of the others follows. Greimas's device does not. As Umberto
Eco notes, 3 8
when Greimas elaborates a system of oppositions of meaning in order

to explain the narrative structures . . . he undoubtedly brings to light
the oppositions which can be found in the text at the level of a certain
working hypothesis; but nothing prevents another reader, using that
text in a different way from singling out another key to reading and
therefore of reducing it to different oppositional values.
Greimas diagrams uncover the structure of texts, or the world itself

as it is represented in such texts, apart from appeal to authorial in-
tention. The author has disappeared, replaced by an impersonal
structure.
W h a t attracted a r t w o r l d readers to Krauss's Greimas d i a g r a m s
w a s their pseudotechnicality. Structuralism aspired to be a science.
Krauss t h o u g h t that the vocabulary of art history could be trans-
lated into structuralist terms. 3 9 Picasso's m o d e r n i s m a n d Heinrich
Wolfflin's art history 4 0
both convert diachrony into synchrony Both take successions of raw

historical phenomena and transform them into formal systems—in
fact, the same formal system. . . . Meaning does not arise from the
positivity of a simple existent (color for example) but rather from a
system of differences (color and not line), the meaning of any choice
being equally (and simultaneously) a function of what is not chosen.
Picasso and Wolfflin at roughly the same time d o for the practice a n d
theory of the visual arts w h a t Saussure does for language.
Krauss refers to the well-known categories of Wolfflin's Principles
of Art History, which seem to be oppositional: linear/painterly,
plane/recession, closed and open form, multiplicity/unity, clear-
ness and uncleamess. She thinks his history of the transition from
the sixteenth- to the seventeenth-century m o d e s of depiction is a
structuralist analysis. Wolfflin uses linguistic metaphors: "in the

course of time, art manifests very various contents, but that does not
determine the variation in its appearance: speech itself changes as
well as g r a m m a r and syntax." 4 1 Krauss believes that his "art history
without n a m e s " is a semiotic account in which the "meaning (of Ra-
phael's) The School of Athens as Classical style is possible only in rela-
tion to its not being Baroque." 4 2
Wolfflin's Principles of Art History presents his categories as binary
oppositions. But his fullest account of The School of Athens is a formal
analysis setting the painting in historical context: 43
Here, Raphael is obviously following in Michelangelo's footsteps . . . .
The group of the geometers is a solution to a formal problem which

few have ever attempted—five figures directed towards a single
point, clearly developed in space, pure in outline, and with the great-
est variety in attitude.
Suppose Italy had been conquered by the Muslims in 1550, so there

had been no baroque. Still this description of Raphael's painting
w o u l d m a k e sense. It therefore is not true that Raphael's classical
style in defined only in relation to the baroque. 4 4
Ernst Gombrich argues that Wolfflin's procedure is inherently
flawed. Looking at two Madonnas, 4 5
it is legitimate and illuminating to compare the Caravaggio with the

Raphael, for, after all, Caravaggio knew Raphael's work.... But when
we read the comparison the other way round and contrast the Ra-
phael with the Caravaggio we are on more dangerous ground. We im-
ply that Raphael, too, deliberately rejected the methods of
Caravaggio. . . . He cannot have rejected what he never knew.
Insofar as the historian's goal is to describe Raphael's art as he him-

self understood it, Gombrich is correct. Still it might be illuminating
to anachronistically contrast the Raphael and Caravaggio paintings
in Wolfflin's way. But doing that would not justify Krauss's claim
that Wolfflin is implicitly developing a semiotic art history. Wolfflin
believes w e see painterly a n d linear paintings as illusionistic repre-
sentations. K r a u s s t h i n k s each element has m e a n i n g only in
structuralist, that is, in oppositional terms: 4 6
44 Rosalind Krauss
In Picasso's collage... a frequently employed sign for depth is the dif-

ferent sizes of the two f-shaped sound holes of a violin. . . .The inscrip-
tion of these f's is not so much the mark by which we infer the
presence of the violin in space as it is the writing of an absent spatiali-
ty onto the surface of the image.
Her goals are thus quite different from Wolfflin's.

There are two w a y s of presenting semiotic theories of visual art.
The editors of a recent wide-ranging anthology Visual Culture, which
includes studies of old masters as well as accounts of p o p u l a r cul-
ture, say that each of their authors "invokes a semiotic notion of rep-
resentation . . . defining the work of art as a semiotic representation,
that is as a system of signs" 4 7 All visual representation is semiotic. 48
O n the narrower view, developed by Krauss, only some representa-
tions such as cubist pictures are semiotic. Because she motivates her
account by contrasting cubist pictures with other more traditional
figurative images, the general semiotic theory is inconsistent with
her analysis. Her analysis of the various techniques of representa-
tion employed within a single picture does not d e p e n d on broader
claims about the plausibility of semiotic theories of representation.
Krauss is interested in "an art history that has accepted the degree to
which signs and social structures exceed the grasp of the individual,
an art history that is seeking to understand the forms of d e p e n d e n c y
between the artist and the systems of representation that function as
his or her already elaborated context."49 The goal is to avoid appeal
to intentions.
Without reference to French philosophy, in his 1964 essay "The
Artworld" Arthur Danto developed a structuralist analysis.
I m a g i n e that p a i n t i n g s are characterized b y qualities, G "is repre-
s e n t a t i o n a l " a n d F "is expressionist." That w h a t he calls the style
matrix,
F G
+ +
+ -
- +
- -
characterizes all paintings. Every painting possesses, or does not

possess, the quality of being F a n d G. A n d more qualities could be
added. If some n e w painting comes to have the quality H, the chart

reads: 50
F G H
+ + +
+ + -
+ - -
- - 4.
- + -
. . .
- - -
Every other painting in existence becomes non-H, and the entire com-
munity of paintings is enriched— It is this retroactive enrichment of
the entities in the artworld that makes it possible to discuss Raphael
and De Kooning together, or Lichtenstein and Michelangelo.
Danto had, he has explained recently, "a kind of political vision that
all works of art were equal, in the sense that each artwork had the
same n u m b e r of stylistic qualities as any other." But the trouble with
the style matrix, he came to think, is that it is essentially ahistorical.
Juxtaposing works with radically different styles, it treats "all works
of art as contemporaries, or as quite outside of time." 5 1
Danto makes the same point as Gombrich. Structuralism cannot
explain change. Can Krauss use a structuralist account to explain the
history of postmodernism? Could ahistorical analysis explain the ori-
gin of n e w art forms? When an historian seeks to explain w h y at a
certain m o m e n t the development of some n e w art form is signifi-
cant, a timeless comparison of styles is irrelevant. 52
Insofar as logic proceeds formally, presenting its rules without refer-

ence to the time, place or circumstances of their use, is it not the mode
of analysis most inimical to understanding historical process?
What explains change is a narrative. 5 3
(1) x is F at t-1
(2) H happens to x at t-2
(3) x is G at t-3
46 Rosalind Krauss
"(1), (2), and (3) simply has already the structure of a story. It has a
beginning (1), a middle (2), and an end." Greimas diagrams diagram
change, and so can be transformed into a narrative sentence like "(1),
(2), and (3)." But the diagram cannot bypass the need for historical
explanation. An historical process can be presented atemporally, but
doing that is self-defeating if the aim is to explain change.
Were this the entire story, then Krauss's structuralist analysis
would fail. But there is more to her argument. 54
The expanded field of postmodernism occurs at a specific moment in

the recent history of art. It is a historical event with a determinate
structure— This is obviously a different approach to thinking about
the history of form from that of historicist criticism's constructions of
elaborate genealogical trees. It presupposes... the possibility of look-
ing at historical process from the point of view of logical structure.
Krauss gives a structural analysis of postmodernist sculpture and ex-

plains why that structure developed in the 1960s and 1970s. The
ahistorical part of her account is supplemented by historical analysis.
When Greenberg connected cubism to Abstract Expressionism, as
when Passages linked Rodin to minimalism, these histories link to-
gether different artworks without much regard for artists' inten-
tions. Such genealogies are like slide show narratives. Cubism is
shown to lead to Pollock or Rodin to Richard Serra. What made such
stories problematic is recognizing that it is possible to construct such
a genealogy for any artist. Greenberg thought that Abstract Expres-
sionism led on to Morris Louis. You might, rather, write a genealogy
in which Picasso led to Picabia led to David Salle. Histories are not
value neutral. If Salle is Pollock's heir, then his paintings also should
be valuable. The same objection could be made to Krauss's
prestructuralist theorizing. If Richard Serra is Rodin's successor,
then his sculptures should also be valuable. That way of establishing
artistic value is problematic.
Pollock's paintings look very different from cubist works, but in
Greenberg's historical narrative they deal with essentially the same
concerns. Rejecting that way of thinking, Krauss argued that
postmodernism breaks with modernism. The Originality rejects the
explanatory techniques of traditional art history. The belief in art as
self-expression, which lies behind biographical explanations; the
belief in the unique artwork; the belief that an artist develops in a
continuous way: Krauss critiques these ideas. Postmodernism is es-
sentially unlike earlier art. The Greimas diagram, which shows the
structures of postmodernism, must be supplemented by an histori-
cal account explaining why those structures developed at a particu-
lar temporal moment. Krauss's structuralist diagram differs, then,
from Danto's style matrix. Because Danto believes that the history of
art ended with Warhol, he can diagram all of the possibilities.
Krauss does not believe that art's history has ended. Her Greimas
diagram identifies the range of artworks possible at one time, but in
the future, other forms of art are possible.55
Do Greimas diagrams avoid the arbitrariness of genealogies?
Jameson thinks that the structures are not arbitrary.56
We never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a

thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the always-already
read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous in-
terpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—through the sedimented
readings habits and categories developed by those inherited interpre-
tive traditions.
As a reader brings to a text experience of other books, so we see vi-

sual art influenced by art we know already. That much is common
sense. Jameson's more interesting claim is that he provides the best
possible account of the meaning of a text. Analogously, Krauss
claims that she provides the best possible structural analysis.
Behind Jameson's Kantian vocabulary is an appeal to psychoana-
lytic models. Freud presented unconscious thoughts—Jameson's
and Krauss's goal is to identify the unconscious of a text or artwork
as it really is. If the Greimas diagram only shows one person's associ-
ations to the artwork, then how significant could it be? Jameson's ar-
gument that his is the best of all possible interpretations will
convince only those who accept his highly personal Marxist adapta-
tion of Christian textual exegesis. A text cannot be scrutinized all at
once, and so can be understood only by bringing outside knowledge
to bear. The visual artwork is seen essentially all at once—totally ac-
cessible to the eye. Greenberg laid particular stress on this purely op-
tical nature of modernism. And so, for Krauss to claim that we can
understand what we view only by knowing what is visually re-
pressed is surprising. An artist can repress a thought. What, by anal-
ogy, would it mean to speak of something visible as repressed?
Here we return to the role of intentions in the structuralist analy-
sis. One often defended traditional view is that interpretation must
48 Rosalind Krauss
appeal to the artist's intention. If w e override his o w n view of his

goals, failing to take his intentions seriously, then, so Richard
Wollheim argues, our analysis will be arbitrary. 5 7
In certain quarters, where the view is taken that criticism is at liberty

to project on to a work of art whatever it wishes, or whatever it finds
original or suggestive or provocative, and in this liberty lies the vital-
ity of art, it is insufficiently appreciated that, in taking this view, crit-
ics, or friends of criticism, cut off the branch on which they sit. For the
view in effect cancels the status of art and relegates art to the status of
nature.
This is wrong. 5 8 The artist intentionally makes an artifact, b u t often is

not in the best position to describe the artwork. 5 9 That a visual arti-
fact w a s m a d e intentionally does not imply that its maker can pro-
vide the best verbal description. A critic might legitimately describe
the picture in terms u n k n o w n to the artist.
Krauss tends to be skeptical of appeals to intentions: "Since
Pollock's statements can be s h o w n to have been the result of a kind
of ventriloquy practiced by his various m e n t o r s . . . . they give us no
reliable sense of his o w n intentions." 6 0 Danto says something similar
about Warhol: "It is difficult to pretend that Warhol's intention w a s
to clear the u n d e r b r u s h and m a k e room for a finally adequate theory
of art. In some ways it is p e r h a p s inscrutable w h a t his intentions ever
were." 6 1 Warhol intended to celebrate popular culture—but he did
not think of himself as a philosopher of art. Greenberg also argues
that appeal to intentions cannot explain art's development: 6 2
The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to

Cezanne is howr it was brought to the verge of abstract in and by its
very effort to transcribe visual experience with ever greater fidelity.
The logic of the Impressionist readjustment... had to work itself out
regardless of the volition of individuals.
In Greenberg's Hegelian narrative, the logic of art's history w o r k e d

itself out regardless of w h a t individuals desired. Krauss rejects this
historiography, b u t accepts Greenberg's view of the irrelevance of
intentions.
Philosophical art critics, w h e t h e r they write genealogies or con-
struct structural diagrams, u n d e r p l a y the importance of intentions.
H o w then can their interpretations be evaluated? The danger, as
m u c h for Krauss's structuralist analysis in The Originality as for her
historical narrative of Passages, is that the analysis be merely arbi-

trary. When interpretation appeals to intentions, the critic can get
the artwork "right," his account matching what the artist intended.
But once we place works of art in a genealogy, or set them in a struc-
ture, who is to say that other histories or structures are not possible?
This worry about arbitrariness led Krauss to reject the historical
analysis developed in Passages. To defend the structural account of
The Originality she needed to present an ahistorical definition of art.
This argument is the subject of the next chapter.
NOTES
1. "Editorial Note" (introducing Leo Steinberg, "The Philo-
sophical Brothel") October 44 (spring 1988): 5. See also Rosalind E.
Krauss, "Perpetual Inventory," October 88 (spring 1999): 89 n. 6. In
an earlier account, I identify the dominant critics of the
post-Greenberg generation as his followers (The Aesthete in the City:
The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s
[LIniversity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press:, 1994],
p. 178). This Steinberg denied. "In your essay," he wrote, "I find the
phrase 'Steinberg's followers.' As my trusty assistant—typing this
letter as I dictate—blurted out: 'Who the hell are they?'"
2. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-
Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 91.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 93.
Viking Press, 1977), pp. 24, 9.
5. Michael Fried, "How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J.
Clark," in response to Clark's essay "Clement Greenberg's Theory
of Art," Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina
(London: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 65.
ume 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 316; Greenberg, The Collected
Essays, Volume 4, p. 58. The second quotation comes from the re-
vised version of the essay.
7. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, pp. 80, 137, 250, 259,
269.
8. Ibid., p. 254, quoting Donald Judd.
50 Rosalind Krauss
9. Ibid., p. 283.
10. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Richard Serra: Sculpture Redrawn,"
Artforum (May 1972): 42.
Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 287.
12. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 393.
13. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, pp. 262, 259, 270, 269.
14. Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art
in a Culture of Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),
p. 106.
15. "Problems of Criticism, X: Pictorial Space and the Question
of Documentary," Artforum (November 1971): 69.
16. Sheldon Nodelman, "Structural Analysis in Art and Anthro-
pology," in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (1966; reprint, Gar-
den City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1970).
17. He was opposed to Sartre's Marxist historiography; see
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans, anonymous (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 9.
18. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, p. 15. Her account of
David Smith mentions Elsen's account; Rosalind E. Krauss, Termi-
nal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1971), p. 29 n. 16.
19. Albert Elsen, "Clogged Passages" (Review of Passages),
Artnews 74, 4 (April 1978): 140.
20. The title of an exhibition catalog by Elsen, The Partial Figure
in Modern Sculpture: From Rodin to 1969 (Baltimore, MD: Museum
of Art, 1969) points to his differences with Krauss. For him, much
modern sculpture fragments the body; for her, that way of identi-
fying modernist subjects begs the question. See Elsen's catalog es-
say, Pioneers of Modern Sculpture (London: Hayward Gallery,
1973.
21. I summarize Elsen's "Are the Gates Complete?" Rodin Redis-
covered, ed. Albert E. Elsen (Washington, DC: National Gallery of
Art, 1981), pp. 73-75.
22. That is the subtitle of chapter 8 of his The Gates of Hell by
Auguste Rodin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985).
23. Letters, Joseph W. Henderson, with reply, Art in America
(March-April 1978): 136.
24. Rothko executed a major commission for Harvard Univer-
sity. Left in bright natural lighting, these paintings are no longer
exhibited, for their present colors provide little indication of the

artist's intentions. See my "Restoration as Interpretation: A Philos-
opher's Viewpoint," in Altered States. Conservation, Analysis, and the
Interpretation of Works of Art (Mount Holyoke, MA: Mount Holyoke
College Art Museum, 1994), pp. 19-27.
25. Krauss notes that these questions about copies are raised al-
ready by old master art; see her "Originality as Repetition," October
37 (summer 1986): 35-40.
26. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, p. 157.
27. Ibid., p. 181.Writing before Elsen's exhibition opened, she
described in the present tense seeing a movie about the making of
Gates of Hell. That film was never made. She describes that mistake
as "journalistically, an error" and suggests that imagining the film
is a legitimate "part of the staging of The Gates as a theoretical entity
at the beginning of a general inquiry on originality within the con-
ceptual frame of modernism"
28. "A Conversation with Hans Haacke," October 30 (fall 1984):
47.
29. I discuss Benjamin's argument in my "Le opere d'arte false
nell'era della riproduzione meccanica," Museu dei Musei, exhibition
catalog (Florence: Littauer & Littauer, 1988), pp. 29-34.
31. Arthur C. Danto pointed this out to me—I never have taught
logic.
32. Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Eogic
and Scientific Method (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1934),
p. 66.
33. Ibid., p. 52.
34. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Eanguage: A Critical Ac-
count of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1972), p. 164. See also Ronald Schleifer,
"Introduction," A.-J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a
Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983); and Algirdas Julien
Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans.
Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
35. Cohen and Nagel, An Introduction to Eogic, p. 70.
36. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a So-
cially Symbolic Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 167.
37. Consider another Greimas diagram:
52 Rosalind Krauss
male/middle aged male/young

(David Carrier) (Brigston)
female/young female/middle aged
(Liz Carrier) (Marianne Novy)
This diagram of my family shows the alliances and conflicts of my

wife Marianne, Liz our daughter, and Brigston, Liz's dog. If we had a
cat, how different our family life would be!
38. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1976), p. 83.
39. This account builds upon my "Art History," in Contemporary
Critical Terms in Art History, ed. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff
(Chicago: LJniversity of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 129-141.
40. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Re-Presenting Picasso," Art in America
(December 1980): 93.
41. Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the
Development of Style in Eater Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York:
Dover, n.d.), p. 220.
42. Krauss, "Re-Presenting Picasso," 93.
43. Fleinrich Wolfflin, Classical Art: An Introduction to the Italian
Renaissance, trans. Peter and Linda Murray (London: Phaidon,
1952), p. 95.
44. In this section of Classical Art, Wolfflin does not refer to the
baroque. He does, at the beginning of the book, place classical art in
relation to the quattrocento, but not in such a way that classical
painting is meaningful only in relation to what came before.
45. E.H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the art of the Renais-
sance (London: Phaidon, 1966), p. 90. Gombrich argues that for
Wolfflin the High Renaissance always is the hidden norm.
46. Krauss, "Re-Presenting Picasso," p. 94.
47. "Introduction," in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations,
ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), xviii.
48. This is the view of Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson,
"Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin 72,2 (1991): 174-208. They
refer to Pierce, but their view is quite different from that presented
in his "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," Philosophical Writ-
ings ofPeirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), ch. 7.
49. "Only Project" (Review of Richard Wollheim, Painting as an
Art), The New Republic, September 12 and 19,1988, p. 38.
50. "The Artworld," Journal of Philosophy 61, 19 (October 15,

1964): 583.
51. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and
the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997),
p. 164.
52. Craig Owens, "Analysis Logical and Ideological," reprinted
in his Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed.
Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 278.
53. Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1985), p. 236.
55. Krauss's history is essentially discontinuous. Some art histo-
rians focus on describing continuity. In Wolfflin's account, the Re-
naissance leads to the baroque; in Greenberg's history, old master
painting leads to modernism. But it is also possible to find prece-
dents for her concern with discontinuity. When the classical
illusionistic art of antiquity is replaced by Christian pre-Roman-
esque painting, Gombrich argues, art changes entirely.
56. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 9.
57. Richard Wollheim, The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 7.
58. See my "Why Art History Has a History," Journal of Aesthet-
ics and Art Criticism, 51,1 (1993): 299-312.
59. My Poussins Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology
(University Park: Penn State Press, 1993) argues for this claim.
60. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, p. 322; Mark Roskill,
The Interpretation of Cubism (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press and
London: Associated University Presses, 1985) gives a different ac-
count.
61. Arthur C. Danto, "Aesthetics of Andy Warhol," in Encyclope-
dia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998), vol. 4, p. 4.
p. 171.
CHAPTER 3
The Historicist,
Antiessentialist Definition
of Art
Interpretation is not an isolated act, but takes place within a Homeric

battlefield, on which a list of interpretative options are either openly or
implicitly in conflict. . . . [0]nly another, stronger interpretation can
overthrow and practically refute an interpretation already in place.
Fredric Jameson
In the "Acknowledgments" to his Kant after Duchamp, Thierry de

Duve tells how he proposed to Michel Foucault "that the time had
come for artistic modernity to be looked at archaeologically, the
way he (Foucault) had looked at the global episteme of the classical
age." 1 This is what Krauss did in her structuralist phase. De Duve's
account of Duchamp reveals some of the philosophical problems of
such an investigation. For de Duve, as for Krauss, Clement
Greenberg's account of modernism is the natural starting point.
"From Giotto to Courbet," Greenberg writes, "the painter's first
task had been to hollow out an illusion of three-dimensional space
on a flat surface... . Modernism has rendered this stage shallower
and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its
curtain." 2 Giotto, Courbet, and Morris Louis made different looking
objects, but they all were engaged in the same activity. Giotto made
sacred images; Courbet produced resolutely materialist land-
scapes; Morris Louis painted abstractions. Only under Greenberg's
56 Rosalind Krauss
description is it true that they all are doing the same thing. To adopt
this as the description of their activity, independent of their inten-
tions, is an Hegelian procedure. Beneath its apparent changes,
painting has an unchanging essence. Here we return to Steinberg's
argument that postmodernism breaks with tradition. The shift in
orientation, which he says defines the novelty of postmodernism, is
also part of a continuous development. But focusing on continuity
prevents understanding what happens. 3
The new is made comfortable by being made familiar, since it is seen

as having gradually evolved from the forms of the past. Historicism
works on the new and different to diminish newness and mitigate dif-
ference.
Insisting on continuity is a conservative political impulse.

Nominalists do not believe in real essences. "There really is no
such thing as Art. There are only artists." 4 But Gombrich, critical as
he is of Hegel, goes on to tell the story of art as the history of progress
in naturalism. Like Greenberg, Gombrich believes that painters
making very different looking works share a common goal. For
Gombrich there is no abstract art.5
If this game [of Pollock] has a function in our society, it may be that it
helps us to humanize the intricate and ugly shapes with which indus-
trial civilization surrounds us. We even learn to see twisted wires or
complex machinery as the product of human action.
We should treat all such histories, Gombrich's as much as

Greenberg's, as fictions. Narrating the history of art, Greenberg and
Gombrich tell a story gathering together objects of interest. The
structures of these accounts come not from the nature of things, but
from the art writers themselves. It is not a fact that Giotto, Courbet,
and the modernists hollow out an illusionistic space. Nor is it a fact
that Gombrich's painters all make illusionistic representations. Al-
ternative accounts, as true to the facts, are possible. There are diverse
ways of organizing such narratives because art historians describe
nominal essences—not painting as it really is. Greenberg's and
Gombrich's different stories need not come into conflict.
Once belief in the arbitrariness of such narratives became gener-
ally accepted, pleas for the importance of tradition were doomed.
Frank Stella's well-developed genealogy for abstraction, as much as
the analysis developed a little later by me and David Reed, came to
The Historicist, Antiessentialist Definition 57
seem old hat. 6 Krauss identifies the Hegelian structure of Art and
Culture.7
Profoundly historicist, Greenberg's method conceives the field of art

as at once timeless and in constant flux. . . . certain things, like art it-
self, or painting or sculpture, or the masterpiece, are universal,
transhistorical forms... the life of these forms is dependent upon con-
stant renewal, not unlike that of the living organism.
G o m b r i c h ' s story of art m a k e s similar a s s u m p t i o n s . Painting

changes radically over time but always remains painting, in the w a y
that a person, first an infant in the mirror stage, then a y o u n g scholar,
and finally a professor emerita, is the same person through all these
changes.
Structuralists rejected belief in fixed essences lying unchanging
behind the flux of appearances. Barthes describes 8
the ship Argo . . . each piece of which the Argonauts gradually re-
placed, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having
to alter either its name or its form. . . . Argo is an object with no other
cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.
And then he considers a second similar case, his work spaces in Paris
and the country, which have "no c o m m o n object, for nothing is ever
carried back and forth," but possess the same structure. The Argo re-
mains the same ship because it continues to serve the same function;
Barthes's two studies have the same structure because the objects in
them are arranged exactly the same ways.
Talk of e s s e n c e s is g e n e r a l l y rejected by t h e F r e n c h fig-
ures—Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault—discussed in October. But
Krauss's point can be m a d e in neutral terms. Analytic philosophers
call Barthes's example the raft of Theseus. 9
Suppose it were decided . . . to erect a monument to Theseus and to

put his ship upon the monument. Surely some people would say that
the ship put together from discarded planks was the right one to raise
up there. And dispute might break out about this matter between
priests who favoured the working ship and antiquarians who pre-
ferred the reconstruction.
Krauss, the author of The Optical Unconscious, is the same person

w h o when y o u n g was a formalist. Persons are living organisms. The
58 Rosalind Krauss
present Louvre is the same museum where the eighteenth-century Sa-

lons were held. The physical space has dramatically changed, but
there is continuity in its development.
Painting changed dramatically from Giotto to Morris Louis, so
does it make sense to assert (or deny) that such historically distant
artists practice the same activity? Is Greenberg only saying that in
his account the old master art of Giotto and Courbet leads to mod-
ernism? This solution to the ontological problem leaves out his most
significant claim. Greenberg is not just claiming that in his historical
narrative the art of Giotto can be connected with modernism. Were
that the case, then he could allow that in another narrative, the his-
tory of painting might be different. Greenberg thinks painting has a
real essence: modernism painting is the same art as Giotto practiced.
Krauss denies that. "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" argues that
new sorts of artifacts do not share any essential qualities defining
them as sculpture with the older art. But she, like Greenberg, is an
essentialist; it is not possible, she implies, to offer legitimate alterna-
tives to her narrative. Fried suggested an historicist view of art's es-
sence:10
Rather than give up all thought of "essence" in connection with paint-

ing or sculpture . . . one might instead seek to historicize essence by
producing a narrative of the shifting depths over time of the need for
one or more basic conventions within a pictorial or sculptural tradi-
tion.
His account of art's essence differs from hers.

When no appeal to precedent is possible, how then can we know
that these new kinds of things are sculptures? And what criteria
should we use in evaluating them? To know what is art, and how to
judge it, we must know the appropriate conventions. In film, Krauss
says,11
a modernist sensibility pushes a medium to its limits, creating an im-

age of itself in them. And in advance of this the limits are unknown.
Indeed, the limits are given their contour in conjunction with the pro-
cess by which the imagination turns round on itself in order to cap-
ture its—as well as the world's—own image.
Stanley Cavell bases discussion on too narrow a range of exam-

ples. Because he does not know Soviet film of the 1920s and Ameri-
can experimental cinema, Cavell cannot identify the nature of that

medium.
Does sculpture have a real, or only a nominal essence? That is, is it
a fact about the world that sculptures are a distinct sort of thing, or
has Krauss merely identified one possible way of describing sculp-
ture? Earlier we asked a related question. When the postmodernist
asserts that the modernist tradition has ended, is he identifying a
fact about history, or merely asserting that under one description we
find such a break? This question about sculpture's essence of sculp-
ture is internally connected with our query about the historical
break. What defines a break in tradition is making new kinds of
sculptures. These abstruse questions are more likely to concern writ-
ers in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism than critics working
for Artforum. But here, as elsewhere when Krauss takes up philo-
sophical positions, there is payoff for the working critic. Jack
Burnham gives a very different view of the 1960s than does Krauss.
Judging from the perspective of the 1990s, Krauss, not Burnham,
made the right quality judgments. Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and
Robert Smithson—and not the figures Burnham cites, that is, Robert
Breer, James Seawright, and Alex Hay—are the sculptors of that era
who matter. To identify the essence of art requires picking out the
best art. At any time, many conventions defining art are possible. In
the 1950s, some American critics bet on realism; others thought that
French-style Abstract painting was the strongest new art. When in
the early 1960s the moment of Abstract Expressionism passed, vari-
ous successors were proposed. Clement Greenberg argued for what
he called "Post Painterly Abstraction." 12 In fact, pop art and
minimalism proved to be the most significant new art. Only experi-
ence, and not a priori theorizing, can determine what defining con-
ventions are most plausible.
The test of time shows that Krauss made better critical judgments
than Burnham. But that Krauss picked the best artists does not en-
tirely resolve our philosophical questions. As we have seen, there is
more than one way to describe novel art. It would be possible to de-
scribe Serra, Andre, and Smithson differently than Krauss does. In-
stead of treating them as breaking with the past, they might be seen
as extending tradition. Krauss does not allow appeal to intentions,
so asking how the artists saw themselves cannot solve this problem.
When someone makes an error in identifying art, what kind of mis-
take have they made? 13
60 Rosalind Krauss
The modernist painter seeks to discover not the irreducible essence of

all painting but rather those conventions which, at a particular mo-
ment in the history of the art, are capable of establishing his work's
nontrivial identity as painting leaves wide open . . . the question of
what, should he prove successful, those conventions will turn out to
be.
If nominalists be correct, errors in identifying the nature of art in-

volve failure to recognize conventions. W h e n there are competing
accounts of those conventions, w h o s e analysis should be accepted?
Descartes argued that thought is an act of spiritual substances. N o
mere mechanism is capable of thinking. His mistake w a s generaliz-
ing from too n a r r o w a range of examples. In the seventeenth century,
n o one could have imagined our computers. Equally well, no con-
temporary of Rembrandt could have imagined Warhol's Brillo Box.
But in one way, these two cases differ. That a computer could play
chess w a s discovered only w h e n it w a s possible to envisage h o w
such an a p p a r a t u s might be constructed. Alan Turing's classical es-
say " C o m p u t i n g Machinery a n d Intelligence" (1950) w a s inspired
by his work building computers. But there existed in R e m b r a n d t ' s
time objects like Brillo Box.14
A pile of hemp of the sort Robert Morris exhibits now and again
turned up in Antwerp in the seventeenth century when it could cer-
tainly have existed as a pile of hemp but almost certainly could not
have existed as an artwork, simply because the concept of art had
not then evolved in such a way as to be able to accommodate it as an
instance.
Rembrandt could not have seen the pile of h e m p as a work of art. In

1650, the artwork might have existed, b u t it w a s not yet visible.
In his essay " A r t / N a t u r e , " A n d r e w Forge presents a series of ex-
amples—the eighteenth-century reducing glasses m a k i n g the Eng-
lish countryside look like a Claude landscape; a Pissarro-like tree
seen from the top of a London bus; a Barnett N e w m a n e s q u e stripe
on a w i n d o w curtain. 15 Forge d r a w s attention to the interplay be-
tween viewing art in the gallery a n d looking outside in the world.
Someone w h o h a d never heard of these artists could still see a land-
scape, trees, or a curtain in these ways. 1 6 The art of Pissarro a n d
N e w m a n is not the source of novel forms of aesthetic experience.
(Before their paintings existed, these experiences were p e r h a p s
harder to identify.) We can take an aesthetic attitude toward any-
thing—when eighteenth-century aestheticians made this claim,

they said nothing about the nature of art. They did not anticipate
Duchamp's ready mades and Warhol's Brillo Box.
Neither Danto nor Krauss accept Forge's argument. Danto argues
that Brillo Box and other similar objects made in the 1960s reveal the
essence of art. Danto is not an historicist. Krauss, an historicist, ar-
gues that the nature of art has changed over time. Now objects such
as Brillo Box can be artworks. What does it matter whether this recent
discovery reveals what-art-always-has-been or, rather, only shows
that the nature of art has changed? In any event, such things are
artworks. Krauss draws attention to one important difference be-
tween herself and Danto.17 Thinking that the nature of art has
changed, she explains why that change has occurred. By contrast,
because Danto thinks of art's nature as essentially timeless, he is not
concerned with providing such an account. Danto does not deny
that it is possible to offer an historical explanation of why Warhol
took up popular culture. Indeed, he discusses that issue. But as a
philosopher of art history, Danto is concerned with the timeless na-
ture of art. Here we get to a very controversial point: Danto's claim
that the history of art has ended. Some critics associated with October
have made similar-seeming claims. Douglas Crimp's influential es-
say "The End of Painting" (1981) responded critically to some fash-
ionable painters of the 1970s. Unlike Danto, Crimp does not argue
for a philosophical thesis. The protest art Crimp admires might con-
tinue to develop so long as there were injustices to call attention to.
For Krauss too there is no reason that the essence of art might not
continue to change in the future. She does not accept Danto's argu-
ment that art's history has ended.
If we abandon essentialism, how do we know what new kinds of
things are sculptures? We need conventions, defined by the practice
of the artworld, and articulated by critics. Krauss's analysis is akin to
the institutional theory of art. Inspired by a misreading of Danto,
some influential philosophers argued that art is defined by the
artworld community.18 If there are no necessary and sufficient con-
ditions defining art, George Dickie says, then19
A work of art... is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has
had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by
some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution
(the artworld).
62 Rosalind Krauss
When he adds, "this artworld consists of a bundle of systems. . . .No

limit can be placed on the number of systems that can be brought un-
der the generic conception of art. . . Such
. additions might in time de-
velop into full-blown systems," then he supports Krauss's way of
thinking. So far as I know, Krauss did not respond to Dickie's analy-
sis, which was not much discussed by art critics.20 If art has no es-
sence, and the conventions defining art change with the times, what
happens when someone claims that a novel object is an artwork? I
lectured on Danto's theories at the National Academy of Art,
Hangzhou, on a very humid summer evening. A student killed mos-
quitoes, put them on a paper, and asked, "Is this art?" I replied that
many Western artists present similar examples, and that traditional
Chinese art also uses chance procedures such as ink throwing. The
next morning, I asked the students if an empty packing box could be
an artwork. They thought that this was a good question. Chinese
students grasped quickly the conventions of Western art.
Asserting that something is an artwork is interesting only when I
can convince other people. But this merely displaces the problem. If
one person can be wrong about what is art, then cannot a group be
mistaken? One person may fail to obey convention, as when a for-
getful American drives on the right in England. But everyone cannot
fail to obey the convention, for the convention is defined by collec-
tive behavior. Suppose an artist says, "this is art" and makes that
claim everyone else may find puzzling. In Royal Road Test (1967), Ed
Ruscha threw a typewriter from a speeding car. His report, "it was
too directly bound to its own anguish to be anything other than a cry
of negation; carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction,"
perhaps links this action to surrealist tradition.21 The kind of gesture
was much repeated in the 1960s.
Greenberg writes:22
The 18th century saw the "sublime" as transcending the difference

between the aesthetically good and the aesthetically bad. But this is
precisely why the "sublime" become aesthetically, artistically banal.
And this is why the new versions of the "sublime" offered by "nov-
elty" art in its latest phase, to the extent that they do "transcend" aes-
thetic valuation, remain banal and trivial instead of simply
unsuccessful, or minor.
He responds to Duchamp's ready mades, Smithson's earthworks,

and 1960s and 1970s art. Because eighteenth-century aestheticians
had said that we can take an aesthetic attitude toward anything, here
there is nothing new. This argument is not open to Krauss. She holds
that new kinds of art require new kinds of criteria of judgment.
Judged by the standards of Bernini, what can we make of Rodin?
Judged by the standards that make Rodin great, Royal Road Test
probably is bad art.
Here the argument threatens to become circular. To identify the
proper standards of evaluation, we need to know what good art is,
but we cannot identify good art until we establish standards. Politi-
cal philosophers have considered relevantly similar problems. John
Locke claimed that someone gains property rights in previously un-
owned objects by mixing his labor with them. As Robert Nozich
notes,23
this gives rise to many questions. What are the boundaries of what la-
bor is mixed with? If a private astronaut clears a place on Mars, has he
mixed his labor with (so that he comes to own) the whole planet, the
wrhole uninhabited universe, or just a particular plot?
If art has no essence, a sequence of enlargements of the extension of

"art" could take us arbitrarily far away from our present concept of
art. To parody Nozich's questions: Could anything whatsoever be
art? Might everything be art?
Greenberg developed his account of aesthetic judgment under
the spell of Kant.24 But his analysis deviates, in fundamental ways,
from Kant's. When he agrees with Kant, Greenberg would derive
support from him; when he disagrees, Greenberg claims that he un-
derstands taste better than Kant. But because Greenberg does not
depend on the details of Kantian theorizing about mental activity,
agreements with Kant give no reason to support his claims. Kant's
texts are intricate, so a great deal of labor is needed to reconstruct his
views.25 Even had Kant known the art of his day, that experience
would hardly have prepared him to anticipate the dilemmas of our
late-modernist museum-based culture. Kant's a priori argument is
that objectivity in aesthetic judgments is possible. Greenberg's argu-
ment is empirical. Judgments of taste, he argues, are not based upon
rules, but yet they possess objective validity. We judge art intuitively
and spontaneously. That means that we must be prepared to be sur-
prised. Because aesthetic judgments are intuitive, it is unnecessary
and, to some degree impossible, to say much by way of justification.
The claim "this is a great painting" cannot be supported by reason-
64 Rosalind Krauss
ing, for it is not a rule-bound judgment, b u t a response to an object

seen here and now. 2 6
It's no use asking why a work of art succeeds in spite of this and that
fault, in spite of lacking this or that; or why it fails in spite of having
this and that. There the brute fact of the esthetic judgment is, and
there's no thinking or arguing around or past it.
We focus on aesthetic qualities of art, not u p o n its autobiographical,

historical, or political significance. Aesthetic value has nothing to d o
with morality. To confuse the two, as marxists typically do, is to treat
art as a means to an end. Art as art is an end in itself.27
We find, Greenberg says, significant consensus in the long run. In-
tuitive judgments converge, and this agreement justifies calling
taste objective. 28
My taste became objective—it will become objective—long after I die.

Actually, if some of my judgments survive, and posterity goes back to
the works of art I like and goes back to the works of art I don't like and
agrees with me—and when I say posterity, I mean the people who try
hardest... if they, let's say, in succeeding time agree with me, that will
show my taste to have been objective.
Greenberg is not interested in mere empirical agreement. H e claims

that agreement in aesthetic j u d g m e n t s shows something about the
nature of art. From sufficient long-term agreement, w e infer that the
artwork possesses the property of excellence. Following Greenberg,
I w r o t e as if he, following a familiar tradition, t h o u g h t that
long-term agreement defined taste. That claim is plausible. W h e n
w e judge living artists, w e cannot yet achieve objectivity; but the test
of time might make detached j u d g m e n t s possible. But Greenberg
makes eccentric j u d g m e n t s about old masters. 2 9
I was brought up to think of Michelangelo as one of the greatest, if not

the greatest sculptor in Post-Medieval Western tradition . . . I.looked,
and I looked, and the more I looked, the less I liked Michelangelo as
sculptor. . . . I think he was an infinitely better painter than he was a
sculptor. So, there it is.
As for Rembrandt's Night Watch—it "doesn't come off." If consen-

sus about such famous, historically distant figures has not yet been
achieved, then w h e n w e get to contemporary art, there is no h o p e for
agreement. Most people think Picasso's Guernica great, Greenberg
says, but "I challenge anyone to look at that picture and see it as sat-
isfactory." Perhaps Guernica is too close to the present to be judged
objectively. But if Michelangelo's sculptures and Night Watch have
been so badly misjudged, then long-term agreement does not
amount to much.
In declaring that such recent figures as Johns, Rauschenberg, and
Warhol are great artists, commercial interests are engaged. But
when, denying that they are significant artists, Greenberg appeals to
future consensus, he writes a promissory note which is impossible to
cash. When critics agree with Greenberg, he fakes that agreement as
evidence for objectivity of taste. When critics disagree with him,
Greenberg concludes that he is right and they are wrong. Agreement
proves nothing. He is committed to claiming, not just that there
should be general agreement about tastes, described in a broad way,
but that all of his often highly personal judgments are objective.
Someone trying to be conciliatory might say that Rembrandt and Pi-
casso are great artists, allowing that there is disagreement about in-
dividual paintings. But that is not Greenberg's position. Aesthetic
judgments, he claims, are about individual artworks. "There is no
question in my mind but that Goya's Third of May is better than any-
thing Pollock could paint."30 He thinks that that judgment is as cer-
tain as his claim that Pollock is a great artist.
When Greenberg describes judging of art, I find his analysis con-
vincing and valuable. Aesthetic judgments are intuitive, spontane-
ous, and unpredictable. Who, making the rounds of the galleries and
museums, has not had the pleasurable experience of being sur-
prised, or the unhappy experience of being unexpectedly disap-
pointed? But what follows? Greenberg wants to argue that his
intuitive judgments are not merely arbitrary. That desire is under-
standable. Passionately admiring a painting, how can I not expect
everyone to agree with my judgment? In fact, often friends do not
agree with me. Connoisseurs agree (within limits) about quality
judgments. Poussin scholars have well-established ideas about how
to evaluate his paintings. But when we judge new kinds of art forms,
what standards are relevant? David Sylvester describes his initial re-
sponse to Abstract Expressionism:31
When exposed to the first rate examples shown at the 1950 Venice Bi-
ennale, I reacted in an utterly obtuse way, proudly exhibiting that
66 Rosalind Krauss
blindness in a patronising notice. . . . I was incapable because I was

blinded by an old fashioned anti-Americanism.
After consensus is established, a critic may thus see the errors of his
earlier judgments. But how is consensus established?
Krauss thinks her judgments correct, and that those who disagree
with her are wrong. But of course her opponents think the same. A
political analogy is helpful. When aristocrats were no longer treated
differently than other citizens, when slaves were freed, women
given the vote, and those once called "cripples" reclassified in more
sympathetic ways, then old standards were abandoned. Moral revo-
lutionaries such as John Stuart Mill in his The Subjection of Woman
persuaded people that the existing standards were inconsistent. We
have progressed by abolishing feudalism and slavery, Mill argues
that patriarchy is, in morally relevant ways, similar, and so also
should be abolished. A critic, analogously, aims to be persuasive.
Believing that art had an essence, Greenberg said he could intuit
the value of original artworks. Greenberg saw that early Jasper Johns
was minor and Jules Olitski great. Olitski's paintings looked very
different from early modernist and old master work, but all art could
be judged by the same standards. Olitski, Manet, and Giotto were
pursuing the same goals, as different as their paintings appeared.
His way of thinking allowed no legitimate room for disagreement.
When in conversation I posed this problem, Greenberg told me that
I, like Alfred Barr and everyone else who disagreed with him, was
"blind as a bat." It is easy to see why people found Greenberg arro-
gantly annoying. He did not claim that he knew more than me be-
cause he was more experienced at judging art; he said that I was not
looking very carefully. But I was, and still I disagreed with him
Greenberg believed that there were standards of taste, impossible
to articulate in words,, but knowable intuitively. Because these stan-
dards are fixed, it was impossible to doubt judgments of taste. Once
Krauss allows that critical standards change, who is to determine if
her judgments are correct? Appeal to historical precedent cannot
demonstrate that her standards are correct. Some aestheticians ap-
peal to the test of time. As a coat is a good coat if it lasts, or a political
system good if it survives conflicts, so an artwork is good if it sur-
vives the test of time.32 Mill dismissed such an argument for patriar-
chy. That patriarchy has survived the test of time only shows that a
bad system may last. For the art critic, this test of time is useless. In a
gallery I plan the review which in two months will be in print. The
consensus achieved in fifty years will d e p e n d in part on the cumula-

tive effect of m a n y published judgments like mine. Suppose that
critics' claims have no other g r o u n d than the consensus. The reason
that some thing is an artwork is that m a n y people believe it to be an
artwork. The g r o u n d s for excellence of art of our era are determined
by convention. The art critic is a rhetorician, seeking to persuade
many people that her view is correct. This view of art writing as a
form of rhetoric has problems of its own. H o w does the critic per-
suade us? Greenberg argues that original-looking kinds of work can
be classified a c c o r d i n g to w e l l - e n t r e n c h e d s t a n d a r d s . As an
antiessentialist, Krauss cannot adopt this way of thinking.
Danto is an essentialist. Since the history of art has ended, the nec-
essary and sufficient conditions for being an artwork can be given.
But for him, this historiography does not determine h o w to critically
judge particular artworks. The working critic must look at each kind
of art on its o w n merits. Krauss is an antiessentialist. Not all things
are possible—not any thing could be a sculpture. "The field pro-
vides both for an expanded but finite set of related positions for a
given artist to occupy and explore, and for an organization of work
that is not dictated by the conditions of a particular medium." 3 3 But
w h a t are these limits? Rodin w o u l d have difficulty recognizing
sculpture "in the expanded field " of Richard Long and Joel Shapiro,
two 1960s and 1970s figures discussed by Krauss. The conventions
defining sculpture could change again in equally dramatic ways.
The art of 2050 could be as unlike our art as 1970s art is unlike seven-
teenth-century sculpture. Walter Benjamin claimed that 34
art has no essence apart from the specific circumstances of its making.
Thus mechanical reproduction has come to change, historically, the
conditions of the work of art: to relocate the status of the original; to
alter the conception of agency we attach to the idea of the author; to
blur the boundaries of where the work begins and everything else
ends; and so on.
P e r h a p s sociological analysis explains h o w the n a t u r e of art

changes. Danto's argument, which leads to theorizing about the end
of art history, is based upon Brillo Box, an artwork physically identi-
cal with the mere brillo box in the grocery. Warhol and the other p o p
artists intended 3 5
68 Rosalind Krauss
to blur, if not to obliterate, the boundaries between high and low art,
challenging, with commercial logos or panels from comic strips or ad-
vertisements from newspapers and magazines, distinctions assumed
and reinforced by the institutions of the art world—the gallery, with
especially its decor and the affected styles of its personnel; the collec-
tion; the carved and gilded frame; the romanticized myth of the artist.
Warhol's whole body of art might thus be associated with Danto's

argument about the end of art's history.
The conventions determining what is art, and so also how art is to
be judged, are determined by historical precedent. Greenberg pro-
vided the most important analysis for his era, Krauss's starting
point; and so for the next era, the appropriate conventions are found
by a negation of Greenberg's analysis. The Originality described the
conventions of postmodernism. What remains unachieved is a justi-
fication of these conventions. That is the task of Krauss's next book,
The Optical Unconscious.
NOTES
1. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996), p. xiii.
p. 136.
3. In Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 277.
4. E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 16th ed. (London: Phaidon,
1995), p. 15.
5. E.FI. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of
Pictorial Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1961), p. 267.
6. Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1986); my essay with David Reed was "Tradition,
'Eclecticism' and Community. Baroque Art and Abstract Painting,"
Arts (January 1991): 44-49.
8. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 46.
9. David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1980), p. 93.
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 33. He got this idea
from Wittgenstein's writings,
11. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Dark Glasses and Bifocals, A Book Re-
view," Artforum (May 1974): 61.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 192-197.
13. Michael Fried, "How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J.
Clark," Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina
(London: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 71.
p. 45.
15. Philosophy and the Arts: Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 6
1971-72 (London: Macmillan, 1973), ch. 13.
16. Forge's last example, men installing boxes that look like
Judd's minimalist sculptures, is a little different. Such objects were
not seen in city streets before the industrial revolution. This minor
point does not undercut the general force of Forge's analysis.
17. See her "Post-History on Parade," New Republic, May 25,
1987, pp. 27-30.
18. The problems with this view are discussed by Richard
Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1980), first supplementary essay, pp. 157-66.
19. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 34, 33.
20. See my reviews: George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic in Jour-
nal of Philosophy, 62, 22 (1975): 823-825; George Dickie, Evaluating
Art in Arts, (October 1990): 126.
21. In Lucy Lippard, Six Years . . . (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1997), p. 22.
22. Clement Greenberg, Avant-garde Attitudes. New Art in the
Sixties (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1969), p. 12.
23. Robert Nozich, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic
Books, 1974), p. 174.
24. See Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on
Art and Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
25. See, for example, John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Cri-
tique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
26. Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, p. 67.
70 Rosalind Krauss
27. This is not to say that aesthetic values take precedent over
moral values. Greenberg says that human beings matter more than
art.
28. Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, p. 109.
29. Ibid., pp. 112,91.
30. Ibid., p. 150.
31. David Sylvester, About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948-96
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 20.
32. This argument is developed with great ingenuity in An-
thony Savile, The Test of Time: An Essay in Philosophical Aesthetics
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). My critical review (Journal of Phi-
losophy, 81, 4 (1984): 226-230) does not do justice to the intricacy of
his argument.
33. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 288-289.
34. "Post-History on Parade" (Review of Arthur C. Danto, The
State of the Art; The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and The Philo-
sophical Disenfranchisement of Art), New Republic, May 25,1987, p. 28.
A clear presentation of Benjamin's argument, as read by Krauss,
appears in her "Alfred Stieglitz's 'Equivalents,'" Arts Magazine 54,
6 (February 1980): 134-137.
35. Arthur C. Danto, "Aesthetics of Andy Warhol," in Encyclope-
dia of Aesthetics, vol. 4, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1998), p. 43.
CHAPTER 4
Resentment and Its

Discontents
It is the mark of fantasies that we return, obsessively and repetitively, to

the same images and the same scenarios, over and over again. We do
not for the most part live our fantasies out, and so they never evolve.
Arthur C. Danto
In rejecting Greenberg's historicist theory of art, Krauss did not

leave formalism behind. On the contrary, the more she tries to sepa-
rate herself from him, the closer she comes, in some ways, to his
ways of thought. "Krauss's reinterpretation of the history of Mod-
ernism ... in many respects... repeats the form of Greenberg's judg-
ments, while trying to invert their meaning." 1 Krauss's sense of
selfhood involves absolute closeness to her allies and violent dis-
tancing from foes.2 Her extreme way of thinking is well suited to the
art critic, who must distinguish the few major artists from their
many contemporaries. An artwork is either major or it is worthless.
This is an all-or-nothing way of thinking. When still a formalist,
Krauss introduced her account of David Smith by criticizing various
recent denunciations of formalism. "While this study was taking
form, a rash of attacks on the critical procedures of formal analysis
broke out." 3 Soon she too rejected formalism. Through all the drastic
changes in her theorizing, she has not changed her personal style.
Recently introducing her account of Jasper Johns, Krauss talks about
72 Rosalind Krauss
her frustration with Robert H u g h e s ' s review: "I m u s t have read it on

an airplane since that's the only occasion I ever h a d to see Time m a g -
azine. I remember m y indignation." 4 W h a t art critic is not frustrated
by disagreements with peers? But for Krauss, disagreement pro-
vides the natural starting point for her o w n positive discussion.
Forming alliances and struggling against enemies are c o m m o n ,
almost universal practices. "Academic life is about learning a n d
continuity as well as about controversy and dispute. These two
w a y s of getting the business of knowledge production done inter-
sect and interlock." 5 I admire Krauss's capacity to use creatively
w h a t might otherwise seem an inevitable h u m a n limitation. Few im-
portant intellectuals are as economical. We m a y like to imagine that
deeply innovative scholars a n d artists build u p o n the achievements
of their p r e c u r s o r s in u n e n v i o u s w a y s . P e r h a p s this h o p e is
overoptimistic. Making art a n d writing criticism involves rivalry
with one's master, and in this struggle, the weight of tradition is
heavy. Harold Bloom's account of rivalry and poetry is famous, and
Richard Wollheim and N o r m a n Bryson have described rivalry in
painting. But no one else has pressed these concerns so far in art criti-
cism as Krauss. The Optical Unconscious psychologizes the structural
analysis of The Originality of the Avant-Garde.
Art critics create values. Nietzsche's 6
polarization of terms, one of which (the one that describes one's own
position) is good, while the other (the one used for someone else's) is
bad, and the role that this polarization into a system of binaries plays
in the very constitution of a self—this ethical scheme is what Nietz-
sche's genealogies alerted us to. "Slave ethics/' he said, "begins by
saying no to an 'outside,' an 'other,' a nonself, and that no is its creative
act."
We m a k e a sharp distinction between good art and bad art admired

by uncritical viewers. Nietzsche describes Krauss's procedures: 7
The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes

creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of nature that are
denied the true reaction, that of deeds. . . . This inversion of the
value-positing eye—this need to direct one's view outward instead of
back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist,
slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs,
physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all—its
action is fundamentally reaction.
Resentment and Its Discontents 73
As Stephen Bann observes, "the culminating drama of the whole

book (and in a sense, its precondition) is the attempt to settle scores
with" (Greenberg).8 He complains that Krauss, making use of Rene
Girard's ideas in The Optical Unconscious, refers to only one early
book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Girard is prolific, but because his
concerns are rather different from Krauss's and he—so far as I
know—does not discuss visual art, I am not sure what to make of
this fact. Krauss is not concerned with the details of Girard's devel-
opment, but with a way of thinking about rivalry which is relevant
even to someone who, unlike Girard, does not focus on religion and
anthropology.9 Here then, without exploring the nuances of Girard's
claims, I analyze Krauss's ways of thinking.10
The Optical Unconscious cites Girard to explain the envious rela-
tionship of Warhol to Pollock.11 Warhol's Oxidation Paintings "leav-
ing behind the sense of violence that Pollock's traces had carried . . .
bury the erotics of aggressive rivalry that was potential in the origi-
nal, the very erotics that had probably attracted Warhol in the first
place."12 But the biography of Warhol by Bob Colacello, Krauss's
source, does not say that.
"'It's a parody offackson Pollock,'" he told me. . . . Andy liked his work to
have art-historical references, though if yon brought it up, he would pretend
he didn't know what you were talking about." These Warhol paintings al-
luded to the practices of "the13 sexual fast crowd His specialty was sensing
the times as they happened."
Warhol's concern with Pollock seems marginal—he envied

Matisse, Picasso, and the Queen of England because they were fa-
mous. Warhol rejected the "macho" style of Abstract Expressionism.
He didn't have any special concern with Pollock's art.
Like Danto, who builds his aesthetic around Brillo Box, Krauss fo-
cuses on only one Warhol. (In Formless she cites a second Warhol,
Dance Diagram, 1962, which also responds to the horizontally of
Pollock's paintings.) The claim she makes about Warhol's view of
Pollock depends only on Oxidation Paintings. Pollock's drip paint-
ings, painted on the floor, were meant to be displayed on walls; and
much commentary discusses Pollock's aggression and regression. A
David Levine cartoon, playing on this tradition, shows Pollock
pissing to make paintings. 14 Rejecting such crude autobiographical
interpretation, Krauss is interested in how, from a 1990s perspective,
Pollock is involved in the informal, associated both with much re-
74 Rosalind Krauss
cent art and with surrealism. She thus connects Pollock to our pres-
ent and draws attention to what Greenberg denied, that is, Pollock's
link with surrealism.
But if Girard's account of mimetic rivalry has only very limited
application to Warhol's relation to Pollock, Girard is extremely rele-
vant to another figure in The Optical Unconscious, Krauss herself.15
We have been talking about critics, one of whom has just presented
her views in an attention-grabbing article about art he detests.
"Spare me smart Jewish girls with their typewriters," he laments.
"Ha, ha, ha," I reply, sparkling with obedient complicity.
Who could not identify with Krauss in this stressful situation?

Greenberg was aggressively nasty, and so the temptation for the
younger critic to pay him back must have been irresistible.
Greenberg admired Pollock; in also admiring that painter, Krauss
was thus copying Greenberg. Krauss also admired Greenberg, and
when she (like many of his admirers) had a falling out with him, it is
unsurprising that she settled scores. She rejected him very much in
his style. She too is arrogant, condescending, proud. Krauss has de-
scribed herself as involved in "[shameful] complicity in Greenberg's
misogynistic dismissal of those others who hadn't made it when the
sides got chosen."161 see his misogyny, but in dismissing those artists
or critics "who hadn't made it" Greenberg was only describing what
happens in the artworld. Krauss too is dismissive of artists and critics.
Watching a film of Greenberg, she thinks: "His face is . . . flabby
and slack, although time has pinched it sadistically and reddened it.
. . . I am held by the arrogance of the mouth." 17 The Optical Uncon-
scious attempts to upstage his theory of modernism. Greenberg was
the grand theorist of the previous generation, so it was impossible to
develop a revisionist historiography without challenging him. Had
Krauss remained deferential, she would have been minor. By imitat-
ing Greenberg, she became major but owed a great debt to her en-
emy. Greenberg was the critic of his day. How then could anyone
involved with contemporary art not wrant to meet him? But because
he tended, so everyone says (and this also was my experience), to be
difficult and adversarial, inevitably he inspired resentful rejection.
What then is strikingly original about Krauss, and so deserves
praise, is her capacity to use her resentment creatively. He has de-
scribed the exactly moment when she broke with him. Giving a lec-
ture at Harvard, summer 1970, about cubism, Krauss said18
I was working with a model... based on ideas from Greenberg's essay

"Collage." . . . and I looked around and I saw this huge amount of
space in the painting. It was a Friday, I remember, and 1 turned to the
class and said, "everything I said to you in the last twenty minutes is a
total lie, and we're going to start with this again on Monday.
In describing Greenberg's arrogance, Krauss did not take up his

remark about their shared Jewishness, nor did she focus on his sexism.
Michael Fried responded in a quite different ways to Greenberg,
turning back to art history, a territory alien to Greenberg. Fried too
broke with Greenberg—"for reasons I only partly understand, our
relations gradually become impossible."19 That he chose not to dis-
tance himself from Greenberg is one reason Fried is a less important
critic than Krauss. Nothing can grow beneath a great tree.
A totem, Freud explains, is "an animal (whether edible and harm-
less or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural
phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar rela-
tion to the whole clan."20 Rationally speaking, the communion bread
and wine are just bread and wine, but in this "transfiguration of the
commonplace" for the believer they become Christ's body and blood.
Rationally speaking, a representational painting is just pigment on
canvas; and a minimalist sculpture is just shaped metal. But in what
Danto calls the transfiguration of the commonplace, "a work of art. . .
has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks.
. .. We are dealing with an altogether different order of things." 21
Philistines, who cannot respond to contemporary art, are fasci-
nated by its cost. But is it really possible to disassociate our aesthetic
interest in art from awareness of economics? A major artwork is a
totem, just another physical thing, but also precious and so untouch-
able. Like totems, artworks are surrounded by prohibitions. They are
set in special places; treated with awe or, on occasion, contempt; in wars
or riots they often are plundered or destroyed. That totems are often
otherwise banal or disgusting objects makes them a model for contem-
porary art, which often is concerned with negating-and-preserving
aesthetic distance. The fetish, somewhat similarly, is "an object of
irrational fascination, something whose power, desirability, or signifi-
cance a person passionately overvalues, even thought that same per-
son may well know intellectually that such feelings are unjustifiably
excessive. "22 The fetishistic quality of art in present-day society marks
76 Rosalind Krauss
the survival of the totem's role in tribal culture, and links religious
uses of the totem with art museums. 23 Fetishes, linking sexual attrac-
tiveness and money, religion, and art, are tantalizing subjects for
postmodern philosophical art critics. Girard discusses Freud's To-
tem and Taboo, arguing that24
because of their large-scale and sophisticated organization, modern
Western societies have appeared largely immune to violence's law of
retribution. In consequence, modern thinkers assume that this law is,
and has always been, mere illusion.... the law of retribution itself is
very real; it has its origins in the reality of human relationships.
Rationally speaking, Greenberg was just a man whose writings enti-

tled him to respect, but his contemporaries treated him like a totem.25
A king of this sort lives hedged in by a ceremonious etiquette, a net-

work of prohibitions and observances . . . Far
. from adding to his com-
fort, these observances, by trammeling his every act, annihilate his
freedom and often render the very life... a burden and sorrow to him.
Pollock, Greenberg claimed, was a great painter. In the 1940s, few

other critics agreed; today almost everyone agrees. Greenberg's suc-
cess gave him power. Freud describes the ambivalent feelings har-
bored toward totem figures: reverence but resentment, affection
but also hatred. Greenberg was the sacrificial victim who had to be
symbolically killed if art was to advance. After the totem is killed,
"it then becomes necessary for ... the survivors ... to defend them-
selves against this evil enemy; they are relieved of pressure from
within, but have only exchanged it for oppression from without. " 26
As The Political Unconscious concludes with Krauss's description
of being put down by one critic, so it begins with a similar scene,
with a different narrative structure. "Little John Ruskin" was easy
"to laugh at" because he "did not even know how to frame a coher-
ent argument." 27 Ruskin, not a formalist, may seem an odd figure to
put down in opening discussion of Greenberg. Ruskin's religious
views lead Krauss to Fried's early essays, and a silly story told by
Fried. Krauss didn't know that Frank Stella thought Ted Williams
the greatest living American because he could see the stitches on a
fast pitch. Fried told her the story "by way, of course, of inducting
me onto the team, Michael's team, Frank's team, Greenberg's team,
major players in the '60s formulation of modernism." 28 But Krauss
has seen through the problems of this team with the aid of the
Greimas diagrams. "By showing m e the system whole, it showed

m e m y o w n outsideness to it. But it also gave m e a w a y of picturing
w h a t it h a d been like to be inside" w h e n she w a s friends with Fried
and Greenberg. We think of ourselves as seen by others, imagining
h o w w e appear in their eyes. 29
My gaze finds its answer in the person I see, so that I can see its effect
in her eyes. . . . I see and I can see that I am seen, so each time I see I
also see myself being seen. Vision becomes a kind of cat's cradle of
crossing line of sight, and Lacan thinks of the whole scene as a kind
of trap.
But Krauss is not outside this system. Motivated by still intense re-
sentment, she rejects Greenberg's ideas about purely optical art.
When Proust's Swann pretended to be indifferent to Odette, he still
cared very m u c h about his former lover. Were Krauss truly outside
of Greenberg's world, she would be indifferent to him. In fact she
continues to borrow from and learn from him.
Krauss has transferred her allegiance to another team, to that of
Fredric Jameson, whose The Political Unconscious suggested her title,
The Optical Unconscious. As he contends that the repressed political
forces decisively influencing a text are not present in the text, so she
claims that the influences on an artwork are not visible within it.
Here she comes back to Ruskin, for Jameson's Marxist account of the
levels of meaning is based u p o n scripture-exegesis. He finds the
Greimas diagram so important because it shows the uniquely best
interpretation. Krauss is not a Marxist, and so this line of argument is
not open to her.
As Krauss's critics have noted, speaking of Greenberg as repress-
ing surrealism does not strictlv follow psychoanalytic w a y s of think-
ing.*>
Repression
Strictly speaking, an operation whereby the subject attempts to re-

peal, or to confine to the unconscious, representations (thoughts, im-
ages, memories) which are bound to an instinct. . . .
In a looser sense, the term "repression" is sometimes used by Freud in

a way which approximates it to "defense."
78 Rosalind Krauss
Defense
Group of operations aimed at the reduction and elimination of any

change liable to threaten the integrity and stability of the
bio-psychological individual.
Greenberg disliked surrealism.31
The Surrealist image provides painting with new anecdotes to illus-

trate, just as current events supply new topics to the political cartoon-
ist, but of itself it does not charge painting with a new subject matter.
On the contrary, it has promoted the rehabilitation of academic art un-
der a new literary disguise.
Marginalizing surrealism was his way of defending formalism. In

treating Pollock as directly continuing the cubist tradition when it
was visually obvious that Pollock's early 1940s paintings borrowed
from surrealism, Greenberg defended his theorizing against an ob-
vious threat. Taking account of the content of these Pollocks would
have destroyed the formalist narrative. A person represses and has
defenses. Formalism repressed the importance of surrealism. To say
that a theory represses or has defenses is a backhanded way of describ-
ing a theorist. But insofar as formalism is a collective creation, with
Greenberg building on the ideas of Roger Fry and other precursors,
this way of talking is useful.
Immediately after describing her response to his remark about
"smart Jewish girls with typewriters," Krauss jumps to the story of
another Jewish woman who, though outwardly obedient to a diffi-
cult male mentor, also had a "desire for instruction." Eve Hesse, the
favorite pupil of the famous teacher, Josef Albers, moved from
painting to sculpture when she "bridled at Albers's limitations, his
rules, his dicta." Hesse's sculptures are misunderstood, Krauss ar-
gues, when praised for moving Pollock's concern with the informal
into a three-dimensional space. In fact "Hesse's process elaborates
the space of painting with its modernist laws, only to sap it from its
very center: yet one more avatar of the optical unconscious." 32
Identifying with Hesse, Krauss uses Hesse's art to support her
anti-Greenbergian reading of Pollock. Hesse is Krauss's Pollock,
standing to her criticism as Pollock does to Greenberg's. That Hesse,
like Pollock, died tragically young reinforces this analogy. What
Greenberg repressed now has been made explicit. And yet, the logic
of this identification is different than Krauss recognizes. She wants
to use Hesse to bring her, Krauss, closer to the authentic Pollock than
Greenberg, his friend, could be. Krauss understands Pollock better
than Greenberg did. And she better understands how Hesse used
Pollock's achievement. Hesse was a great artist, but because she
died at the beginning of her career, she cannot legitimately be com-
pared with Pollock. In Passages in Modern Sculpture, Hesse has but a
modest place. Hesse stands to Pollock as does Krauss to Greenberg:
The implication of that analogy is that Krauss also is relatively mi-
nor. Coming after Greenberg, her achievement is parasitic upon his.
The reactive character of The Optical Unconscious raises questions
about how to understand Krauss's claim that she reveals what
Greenberg and the other champions of optical art—Ruskin and
Fry—repressed. Krauss claims to make explicit what these three
men left hidden. But Krauss, in turn, has left repressed some crucial
aspects about her relationship with Greenberg. Perhaps this shows
that any attempt to make conscious all that has been hidden is
doomed. Art criticism has an unconscious, for something always re-
mains unsaid. Krauss criticizes Greenberg, but leaves more to be
said. When I, in turn, discuss Krauss, I also have blind spots that my
critics can identify. In this self-perpetuating paranoid scenario, none
of us escape missing something. But this is not the whole story. In
fact, Krauss has recognized the limitations of the power of this iden-
tification with Hesse. In her more recent work, she has trumped
Greenberg, discussing an artist inaccessible to him, not Pollock but a
still greater figure, Picasso. Greenberg, she claims, not only was mis-
taken about Pollock, but he also got Picasso wrong.
On the cover of The Optical Unconscious is Raoul Ubac's Portrait in
a Mirror, 1938. In an earlier book Krauss described this photograph: 33
Her eyes, her forehead, part of her hair, obscured as though by

shadow, are in fact corroded and dispersed through the very agency
of reflection— This subject who sees is a subject who, in being simul-
taneously "seen," is entered as "picture" onto the mirror's surface.
The lesson is Lacanian. We may believe that mirrors merely reflect,

permitting us to see ourselves as we really are, but that is mistaken.
Seeing the woman, eyes obscured, unable to see herself, we know
more about her appearance than she does. We see her, but she cannot
look back at us. Someone might think this a photograph of Krauss,
whose portrait appears on some of her books. Her book is in a diary
format, but it is not Krauss's diary. She uses this literary technique
80 Rosalind Krauss
much as the surrealists used photography, as a way to break "down

the difference between .. . author and reader . .. and thus between
the inside and the outside of the text."34
When Krauss became famous enough to have followers, she in
turn found herself on the other side of a Girardian dispute. This was
predictable. Early on, a former friend wrote: "Krauss . . . quite for-
swore papa (Clement Greenberg), dished daddy. Are we yet to see
the day that mama gets kissed off too? I expect so."35 Craig Owens
had published in October but then in a critical review of The Original-
ity published in Art in America, where he was a senior editor, he
turned on Krauss.36 Her methodology is inconsistent, he claims, be-
cause it does not convincingly analyze the myths she claims to un-
mask. Failing to "acknowledge the work of those contemporary
artists who have in fact engaged in a functional analysis of the insti-
tutional frame," Krauss refuses to allow that because two of her es-
says "were originally commissioned by a commercial gallery" and
one by the Museum of Modern Art, she was influenced by these in-
stitutions. This may seem a strange complaint coming from a man
who worked for a commercial publication. But compared with
Krauss, who can, in collaboration with her coeditors, control what
appears in October, Art in America editors, servants of the art market,
have relatively little freedom.37 October has patrons—artists, galler-
ies, and the MIT Press—and so can afford to be noncommercial. The
familiar situation in which younger would-be radicals accuse their
elders of selling out is the inevitable result of success of people who,
defining themselves by struggle against the establishment, become
part of that establishment.
Krauss's account of Warhol's relation to Pollock is obviously
problematic. The Optical Unconscious gives a very accurate descrip-
tion of Krauss's role. Rationally speaking, it ought to be possible to
both admire greatly Greenberg and to acknowledge that he had not
told the entire story. Admiring Baudelaire and Fry is compatible
with recognizing their limits. But when the great art writer is one's
senior contemporary and former friend, then the situation is differ-
ent. No one today responds so directly to Baudelaire or Fry, for no
one knows them personally, but most senior artwriters still have
personal feelings about Greenberg.
In the catalog for his 1998 Pollock retrospective, Kirk Varnedoe
criticizes Krauss and Bois:38
making this artist the father of down-and-dirty "abjection" in con-

temporary art scants the lush prettiness and glamour that can charac-
terize the poured paintings, and touts the antiorder aspects of
scattering and expulsion in the drip method at the expense of equally
salient intimations of controlled sensuality
In rewriting Greenberg's history, with Pollock leading to Cindy

Sherman and Mike Kelly—and not, as with Greenberg's Pollock, to
Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis—Krauss and Bois make Pollock
relevant to the present. Krauss and Bois look at the past to write a
history of the present. Their revisionist analysis is compatible with
the historically oriented account of Varnedoe. Pollock's paintings
can both be glamorous and involved with "antiorder."
Perhaps only now, when Greenberg's era is ended, can we see
how strange was his role.39 When Greenberg praised Pollock highly,
calling him "the most important new painter since Miro" (1947),
"one of the major painters of our time" (1949), how odd those judg-
ments must have seemed.40 What makes a fashionable brand of
clothing or young actor desirable? What is desired is what "every-
one"—that is, everyone in some group—desires. Objectively speak-
ing, what distinguishes Leonardo de Caprio from other handsome
young actors? But few of us remain objective in such a situation. It is
hard to remember that once he was just another young pretty face.
Groups, be they teenagers or art critics, are held together by shared
desires. "Almost everyone thinks that Robert Ryman is a great
painter," that is, everyone in the New York-based artworld, for phi-
losophers of art hardly have any view of him and the larger public
does not know his name. In the larger American culture, the
artworld is a small place. Watching objects change in value before
your eyes is instructive for the art critic, for his writing plays a role in
such transfigurations. As the selfsame painting, once affordable by
an associate professor, becomes very valuable, it comes to look more
desirable, while art which loses all exchange value looks forlorn.
When Yve-Alain Bois says of Krauss, "her combative stance has
constantly represented to me a rock to which I could return at mo-
ments when my strength was threatening to fail," he describes civil
war, not intellectual debate.41 No doubt this is how debate in the
artworld appears to him. Looking at a valuable painting I own, I un-
derstand something about how Pollock's art looked to Greenberg in
the 1940s. Knowing that it is valuable, I am aware of how other peo-
ple see it differently. People from outside the artworld, the postman
82 Rosalind Krauss
or the plumber, do not make these discriminations. That a few con-

noisseurs recognize this painting is enough to transform how I see it.
Here we return to totemism. I know that a representation is just an
inert object, and yet, when it "works" I cannot get out of my mind the
sense that what it depicts is somehow real. When I see the eyes of the
figure portrayed following me, when I am aroused by the erotic
scene, and when I am moved by a Christian martyrdom, then I re-
spond to images as if what they merely depict were real. Rationally
speaking, Greenberg is just another writer—unusually smart and
original, but fallible. But when he was very powerful, it was hard to
see him in this rational way.
Mimetic rivalry is a central issue for the critic, but not the philoso-
pher. Certainly there have been colorful personalities in our disci-
pline, but they produce purely abstract argumentation. The
philosophers' goal is abstract and impersonal. Rivalries enter into
how and why philosophers argue, but not into the arguments them-
selves.42
Russell's theory of types or Goodman's new riddle of induction or

Quine's concerns about the inscrutability of reference do not in any
plausible ways reflect patterns of paternalist oppression, or the poli-
tics of phallologocentrism, however human all too human their spon-
sors. ... By the time even the most urgent of human concerns finds its
way into philosophy, it has been transformed into terms philosophy
knows how to deal with.
Philosophers think it possible to argue about even partisan politi-

cal matters in impersonal ways. It is the art critic's aim is to convince
others to see art in their way. Philosophers are concerned with real-
ity, and critics with matters of appearance. The art critic must wrestle
with precursors, and so, Krauss's argument implies, cannot be ob-
jective.
In the Afterword, I take up the implications of this contrast be-
tween philosophy and art criticism. But first, we need to sketch the
fourth stage of Krauss's career.
NOTES
1. Stephen Bann, "Greenberg's Team" (review of The Optical
Unconscious), Raritan 13, 4 (spring 1994): 159.
2. When Yve-Alain Bois, no doubt joking, says in an interview^,

"Picasso is the fastest eye in the West, except for Rosalind. (Laugh-
ter)/' he identifies himself as her perfect ally. (Linda Nochlin talks
with Yve-Alain Bois, "Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry,"
Artforum [February 1999]: 115.)
vid Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 1.
4. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Split Decisions: Jasper Johns in Retro-
spective. Whole in Two," Artforum (September 1996): 78.
5. Mieke Bal, "Semiotic Elements in Academic Practices," Criti-
cal Inquiry 22 (spring 1996): 581.
6. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Theories of Art after Minimalism and
Pop," in Dia Art Foundation: Discussions in Contemporary; Culture:
Number One, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1987), p. 63.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989),
pp. 36-37.
8. Bann, "Greenberg's Team,"p. 149.
9. See, for example, Rene Girard, Things Hidden since the Foun-
dation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). Bann's account of visual
art owes an important acknowledged debt to Girard, but because it
is so different from Krauss's approach, comparisons are difficult.
See Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the
Western Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press,
1989); and my review, Critical Texts, 7, 2 (1990): 95-102.
10. The very sympathetic exposition by Paisley Livingston
(Models of Desire: Rene Girard and the Psychology of Mimesis [Balti-
more, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1992]) emphasizes the thin empirical
evidence for his theorizing.
11. See Rene Girard, "The Founding Murder in the Philosophy
of Nietzsche," in Violence and Truth: On the Work of Rene Girard, ed.
Paul Dumouchel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988),
pp. 227-246.
MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 277.
13. Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York:
HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 342, 341.
14. Kirk Varnedoe, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Mod-
ern Art, 1998), p. 55.
15. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 309.
84 Rosalind Krauss
16. Rosalind E. Krauss, "We Lost It at the Movies," Art Bulletin

76, 4 (December 1994): 579.
17. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 243.
18. In Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New
York: Soho Press, 2000), p. 292. Krauss says that Greenberg's hawk-
ish views about Vietnam played a role in their break.
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. xvii.
20. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo and Other Works: The Stan-
dard Edition, Volume XIII, trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud,
Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and Insti-
tute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958), p. 2.
p. 99.
22. William Pietz, "Fetish," in Critical Terms for Art History, ed.
Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago, 1996), p. 197.
23. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 103, quotes Frazer to say "as dis-
tinguished from a fetish, a totem is never an isolated individual,
but always a set of objects."
24. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1972), p. 260.
25. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 44.
26. Ibid., p. 63.
27. Krauss, Optical Unconscious, p. 1.
28. Ibid., pp. 7, 20.
29. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing
(San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1996), p. 70.
30. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psy-
cho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1973), pp. 390-391,103.
ume I, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O' Brian (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago, 1986), p. 230.
32. Krauss, Optical Unconscious, pp. 309, 313, 320.
33. Rosalind E. Krauss with Jane Livingston, VAmour fou: Pho-
tography & Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), p. 78.
34. Rosalind E. Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999), p. 15.
35. Robert Pincus-Witten, "Letters to the Editor," Arts 53, 3 (No-

vember 1980): 28.
36. Craig Owens, "Analysis Logical and Ideological," reprinted
in his Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed.
Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 270-271.
37. As Krauss has noted: "Younger writers, I think, are more
vulnerable than I; they don't have a journal open to themselves to
which to turn." ("' . . . And Then Turn Away?' An Essay on James
Coleman," October 81 [summer 1997]: 32.)
38. Varnedoe, Jackson Pollock, p. 55.
39. See my review of Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A
Life in The Nation, June 29,1998, pp. 33-35.
ume 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 155, 286.
41. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1990), p. xxx.
42. Arthur C. Danto, Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts
of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. xiii.
CHAPTER 5
The Deconstruction of
Structuralism
There can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art's sake. It
worked originally in the service of impulses which are for the most part
extinct to-day. And among them we may suspect the presence of many
magical purposes.
Sigmund Freud
The Originality of the Avant-Garde presented a postformalist art his-

tory. But as we have seen, there were problems with Krauss's claim
that Greimas diagrams translate the historical development of art
into a visual structure. Thus, in her recent writings the structuralist
theory is replaced by two quite distinct interpretative approaches,
without any attempt to synthesize them. She has a semiotic theory of
cubism, and, with Yve-Alain Bois, she developed an account of "the
formless." "For Bataille, informe was the category that would allow
all categories to be unthought." 1 Cubist pictures, structured like a
language, are thus as far as possible from the informal, that is, what
lacks structure by definition. These two essentially opposed ap-
proaches together provide a poststructuralist account of modernism.
The best way to understand Krauss's recent development is to
look back to Michael Fried's influential conception of theatricality.
"Art and Objecthood" (1967) argues that the most basic division
within 1960s art is between that superior painting and sculpture that
88 Rosalind Krauss
defeats theatricality and the lesser art that embraces it. Fried's
deeply obscure analysis has been much discussed. In Passages,
Krauss says, "we should try to unpack the notion of theatricality. For
it is too dense and too confusing."2 More recently, she has attempted
an exposition in terms of Sausserian linguistics.3 Fried, whose own
recent exposition is none too clear, rejects her analysis. Her real tar-
get, he argues, "is not Greenberg's or my writings on modernist
painting and sculpture so much as modernism itself." This means,
he correctly notes, that "she has as least as great... an investment in
the global idea of modernist opticality as any critic or historian be-
fore her." 4
An old master painting shows the world from one point of view.5
Nothing is hidden in a Poussin landscape. As it makes no sense to
ask what happens to the characters in a novel after their story is told,
therefore in that painting all that exists is what the artist shows. A
depicted landscape thus differs from a real scene, for when I stand in
the Roman campagna, I know that each step, left or right, forward or
back, will reveal things at present still hidden. That my viewpoint
contains implied horizons, potential views not yet visible, makes the
world a world. Poussin merely shows his world. In composing the
picture, the artist controls what we see. Moving to the side or stand-
ing back, we see the same depicted scene—the same people, trees
and lake—in the same relative positions.
Pollock or Morris Louis, as much as a Poussin, control everything
in a composition. Contrast the theatricality of Duchamp's ready
mades and 1960s minimalism. How we see Fountain, an array of
boxes by Donald Judd, or Carl Andre's metal plates on the floor, de-
pends on our spatial relationship to these objects. The traditional
artist aims to compose his work; rejecting that ideal, the minimalist
leaves open to the viewer to determine how to relate the elements of
a sculpture. Abandoning control to the viewer, a theatrical sculptor
does less than a traditional artist. He thus offers a false freedom—his
sculptures are more like ordinary objects than traditional artworks.
Like theater, minimalism introduces a temporal dimension into our
visual experience.
"Art and Objecthood" begins and ends with frank evocation of re-
ligious ideas. It starts with a quotation from Jonathan Edwards,
speculating about how God might re-create the world at every mo-
ment and concludes by calling "attention to the utter pervasive-
ness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being
The Deconstruction of Structuralism 89
that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theater. We

are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace."6
When Fried distinguishes art that achieves presentness from that
literal work "corrupted or perverted by theater," he makes a theo-
logical distinction. God sees the world as it really is; we mere mortals
see his world in perspective. Like God, the traditional artist creates a
world. All that matters is manifest. Dismantling that tradition, the
theatrical minimalist makes a mere arrangement of things, another
object in the world. 7
By making sculpture that would be perceived in terms of extended

and interconnected surfaces, [David] Smith could force the viewer to
recognize that the sculpture spread before him was unlike other ob-
jects. To force the work to appear entirely open and visible from a fixed
point of view is to provoke the illusion that a sculptural object... can
be known all at once.
If there is no God, then what remains of this quasi-theology?

Fried's ideal presentness requires that everything can be made ex-
plicit. Face to face with a Caro sculpture or Olitski painting, nothing
of aesthetic interest remains hidden. As Krauss characterized this
way of thinking in 1971 "modernist paintings have insisted on the
singleness-of-aspect of painting itself, they have asked us to grasp
the work of art with the kind of immediacy with which we experi-
ence our own inner states."8 Nothing stands between us and our
pain, which thus is as totally accessible as a modernist painting. We
have complete access all at once to the entire artwork, though not, of
course, to the complete physical object; we see the painting's sur-
face, but not its back. Krauss's rejection of Fried's way of thinking
takes very seriously the link between theology and modernism. If
there be no God, presence is impossible to achieve. Because it is im-
possible to make everything explicit, an artwork has an unconscious
in the same way as a person. For Descartes, an idea in the mind is
conscious. If we reject that way of thinking, then maybe Fried's ideal
of presence is also impossible. Greenberg implied that modernist art
achieves presence. Krauss thinks that formalism repressed the fact
that some part of an artwork remains unconscious.
The stages of Krauss's argument as she moves away from belief in
presence can be rationally reconstructed. Structuralism implies that
an artwork cannot be understood in isolation, but only in relation to
alternatives in the Greimas diagram. Fried imagines that an artwork
90 Rosalind Krauss
can be entirely present all at once. He fails to recognize that Caro, as

much as the minimalists, cannot achieve all-at-onceness. To under-
stand a Caro, it must be set in relation to the history of art. The
choices made by Caro are understandable only by knowing what al-
ternatives were possible. Greenberg's genealogies set the appar-
ently self-sufficient modernist artwork in historical context, and
Fried, notwithstanding his disagreements with Greenberg, does the
same. Krauss rejects this procedure. As a structuralist, Krauss still
was committed to an essentially visual way of thinking. The
Greimas diagram translates the possibilities into pictorial form.
Each individual artwork is effectively a fragment, meaningful only
in relation to the system. So, for example, Robert Morris's Untitled
(Mirrored Boxes), 1965, is not a landscape and not architecture—op-
tions defining the context of 1960s postmodern sculpture. 9 That sys-
tem is grasped visually. For the structuralist, nothing need be
repressed— everything can be made visible.
Greenberg understands abstract painting as the product of an his-
torical development in which the pictorial space was gradually flat-
tened. Many champions of abstraction were dismayed when in the
1950s de Kooning and Pollock made figurative images, for it seemed
as if the most advanced abstractionists had suddenly become reac-
tionaries, like the politicians in the era of feminism who rejected the
equal rights amendment. In ways she has not entirely made explicit,
Krauss suggests a different way of thinking about this issue. Once
we abandon Greenberg's teleological account of historical develop-
ment in favor of the Greimas diagram, then abstraction is meaning-
ful only in relation to what it negates, figurative art. Moralizing
about the superiority of abstract painting is wrong headed. The
Greimas diagram translated temporal development into spatial
structure, undercutting the autonomy of the visual artwork.
Jameson argues that we can properly understand what is in the text
only by looking at the larger political context. Analogously, Krauss
asserts that we understand Robert Morris's minimalist sculptures
only by seeing their place in the Greimas diagram. Looking at the
Greimas diagram, we grasp all at once the structure of art. For us, as
for Fried looking at a Caro, presentness is grace. Rejecting
Greenberg's optical way of thinking, Krauss moved beyond this the-
ory. A hint of how to proceed was provided by the problems with the
Greimas diagram that we have discussed. Pretending to be the logi-
cal structure of the range of possible artworks, in fact the diagram
merely offers one interpretation of the evidence. The relevant struc-
ture cannot be laid out once and for all. We can deconstruct that
structure in more than one fashion. There is no hard and fast line be-
tween relevant and irrelevant interpretative materials, for multiple
structures are possible.
In his essay "Collage" (1959), Clement Greenberg argues that
"collage was a major turning point in the evolution of Cubism, and
therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of modernist
art in this century."10 Krauss agrees that cubist collage is extremely
important, but her analysis is different. For Greenberg, printed ma-
terials in cubist pictures "declare as well as to deny the actual sur-
face. If the actuality of the surface—its real, physical flatness— could
be indicated explicitly enough in certain places, it would be distin-
guished and separated from everything else the surface contained."
In this formal analysis, the words in the papier colle are irrelevant, for
what matters is only that words make the flattened picture
illusionistic. "The only place left for a three-dimensional illusion is
in front of, upon, the surface." Greenberg describes these collages in
Marxist language stripped of its original political sense:
the illusion of depth and relief became abstracted from specific

three-dimensional entities and was rendered largely as the illusion
of depth and relief as such: as a disembodied attribute and expropri-
ated property detached from everything not itself.11
Greenberg thus connected Pollock's "trickles and spatters... with

. . . Analytic Cubism." Only when understood formally can cubism
appear the starting point for Abstract Expressionism. Abandoning
structuralism, Krauss deconstructs this historical analysis. No lon-
ger are cubism and Pollock linked so intimately.12 The unified
structuralist analysis offered in The Originality is given up. Once the
Greimas diagram is abandoned, no longer can one history accom-
modate cubism and Abstract Expressionism.13 The discussion of
cubism in Krauss's "The Motivation of the Sign" is further devel-
oped in The Picasso Papers; she offers an alternative interpretation of
Pollock in The Optical Unconscious.14
Once historians of cubism considered the meaning of the word s in
the papier colles, various interpretations were possible. Perhaps the
words from newspapers signal Picasso's political sympathies;
maybe they reveal his erotic concerns. Krauss claims that the papier
colle should be understood semiotically. "One needs a model for
how politics enters the work. It can't just enter the work by walking
92 Rosalind Krauss
in." 15 In 1971, Krauss gave a formalist account of Picasso's cubist

art. 16
As a modernist artist, Picasso felt obliged to insist on the viewer's rec-

ognition that he was confronting an artificial object. Therefore a sense
of the flat and opaque plane was made to qualify every other experi-
ence the painting might offer.
N o w she offers an antiformalist political reading. In Picasso's Violin,

1912, "the very flatness which banishes all three-dimensionality
from the field of the image declares the total presence of the
two-dimensional shape to vision." 1 7 This phrase could almost come
from Greenberg, b u t Krauss uses this observation to very different
effect.
We read collage elements not just as visual forms, b u t as linguistic
signs. Physical things are either present or not, for pictures have no
w a y of representing absence. What is represented is presented as an
illusion. H o w could a painter show w h a t is not present? But a sign
m a y refer to what is absent, as w h e n cubist collage signaled the ab-
sence of d e p t h "through s u m m o n i n g it as a meaning— a signified—
that would be inscribed on the pictorial surface." The papier colle dis-
plays presence-and-absence. Violin refers to d e p t h without letting us
see illusionistic depth, as in a traditional painting.
If semiology refuses the copy notion of representation (the sign as a

copy of a prior model or referent), it's because of a conviction that it is
the signifying medium itself—language, the sign, verbal or iconic—
that constructs the representation, constructing it simultaneously, of
course, as meaningful.18
What matters is not the particular w o r d s used, for Picasso is not

speaking. The fallacy of earlier Picasso commentary w a s to treat his
art as essentially autobiographical. 1 9 The Russian formalists offered
a different approach. When a writer incorporates various voices, w e
read them as w o r d s of speakers without attributing them to the au-
thor. In Lolita, H u m b e r t H u m b e r t is not Vladimir Nabokov. The
novel uses H u m b e r t H u m b e r t ' s voice, distanced from Nakobov's.
Sometimes when I speak, I make an assertion; b u t on other occasions
I utter words without myself asserting them. A visual artist, as m u c h
as a novelist, can engage in this playacting. Both the meaning of
w o r d s and their visual appearance are relevant in cubism. 20
Greenberg made a radical separation between high art and kitsch.

Krauss rejects that opposition— her Picasso draws on popular cul-
ture of the newspaper by employing these materials in high art. This
procedure was employed also in The Optical Unconscious. The vari-
ous voices, which need not all be Krauss's, provide multiple per-
spectives on the narrative.21
I would write as though through the first-person account of many

other characters, actual historical characters, whose narratives I
would, by the mere fact of bringing them into the orbit of my own
subjectively developed voice, suspend somewhere between history
and fiction.
Krauss's semiotic analysis of Picasso's cubism, concerned with that

very special case, does not extend even to contemporary paintings
by Braque and Matisse.
Many contemporary art historians are attracted by semiotic theo-
ries of representation. Norman Bryson, for example, argues that
there is no difference in kind between the abstractions of Pollock and
figurative paintings. 22 But there are obvious problems with what
Bryson takes to be Krauss's position: ''all representation, including
what Lessing would have regarded as lifelike, is grounded in the ar-
bitrary" 23 To understand realism, Bryson argues, is to ask how an
image "creates the effect of lifelikeness—what has been called 'the ef-
fect of the real.'" Gombrich says that Constable's Wivenhoe Park re-
sembles Wivenhoe Park because the painter intended to make a
naturalistic representation. According to Bryson, Constable learned
to manipulate the codes of convention. Gombrich argues that Wiven-
hoe Park looks like Wivenhoe Park because it does, to some degree,
look like what it depicts. Bryson rejects that claim.
Bryson links the semiotic theory presented by Nelson Goodman
and Roland Barthes to leftist politics.24 But Richard Wollheim, a so-
cialist, rejects the semiotic theory; and Goodman had no sympathy
with the left-wing views of early Barthes. If there be any connection
between leftist politics and semiotic theories of representation,
Wollheim and Goodman fail to see this. In insisting that the relation
between representation and reality is arbitrary, the semiotic theory
can be u n d e r s t o o d as a p r o d u c t of, and n a t u r a l ally of
"late-capitalism." Barthes draws examples from advertising. But
that it is arbitrary that chic clothes be seen as glamorous does not
demonstrate that representation in visual art is purely conventional.
94 Rosalind Krauss
An honest leftist cannot take as given his or her political goals and
then decide what theory of representation to accept, as if theorizing
were then free of any constraint except to support the leftist's politi-
cal sympathies. We must find a true view of representation, and
then see what if any are the political consequences. But, as I hinted
earlier, there is some question about whether Bryson correctly re-
constructs Krauss's view of pictures. This argument against a gen-
eral semiotic theory of pictures is not a critique of her account of
cubism. Krauss's discussion of cubist semiotics has few immediate
consequences, at least as she has presented it, for discussion of con-
temporary art. But the second part of her recent theorizing, the dis-
cussion of the formless, has implications for contemporary art.
What kind of aesthetic is possible for the formless—what kind of
story can be told about the informal? In 1975, Andrew Forge wrote:25
Painting means nothing to me if it does not symbolize vision and the

part vision plays in the definition of a stable body seen at a distance, a
stable-self-image, and consequently a stable, freestanding view of the
outside world.
What would it be to give up these beliefs? Uprightness, Krauss

suggests, marks what 26
separates the "beholder" from his object, the gap built into the human
perceptual relation is what provides a space for all those varieties of
vision which separate man from animals: contemplation, wonder, sci-
entific inquiry, disinterestedness, aesthetic pleasure.
Here she is taking issue with a long philosophical tradition. In Mind

and the World-Order, C.I. Lewis says,27
there are, in our cognitive experience, two elements: the immediate

data, such as those of sense, which are presented or given to the mind,
and a form, construction, or interpretation, which represents the ac-
tivity of thought. Recognition of this fact is one of the oldest and most
universal of philosophic insights.
As he notes, what is required is working out the relationship be-

tween the given and the mind's contribution.
W.V.O. Quine writes:28
Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distanced objects....

We cannot strip away the conceptual trappings sentence by sentence
and leave a description of the objective world; but we can investigate
the world, and man as a part of it, and thus find out what cues he
could have of what goes on around him. Subtracting his cues from his
world view, we get man's net contribution as the difference.
In the background here is Kant's general analysis of experience,

which is one source of Formalism.
"When we are in the picture gallery," Roger Fry writes,29
we are employing our facilities in a manner so distinct from that in

which we employed them on the way there, that it is no exaggeration
to say we are doing a quite different thing. On the way there our con-
scious attention must frequently have been directed to spotting and
catching the right bus, or detecting the upright flag of a distant taxi-
cab, or, at least, avoiding collisions on the pavement or recognizing
our friends.
Fry draws a sharp dividing line between aesthetic responses and ev-
eryday life.
When, by sharp contrast, Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic
is30
out for a walk... there is no such things as either man or nature, now,
only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the
machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines every-
where, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the
non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatso-
ever.
They do not recognize any distinction between aesthetic and "prac-

tical" experience. Insofar as language and so also thought itself in-
volves making distinctions, separating what is here-now from what
existed there-then, is this way of talking really coherent?
The radical suggestion of Formless is that Greenbergian formalism
is not based upon a correct philosophical analysis of experience.
Suppose Quine is wrong, and that Deleuze and Guattari are right.
"The unconscious . . . is totally unaware of persons as such— from
which it follows that part objects are not representations of parental
figures: they are parts of desiring machines." 31 Then a quite different
analysis of experience would be required. Deleuze and Guattari bor-
96 Rosalind Krauss
row from Freud's follower, Melanie Klein. 32 Deleuze is too far re-
moved from American academic philosophy to have received m u c h
helpful commentary. A n d so w h a t is most urgently required is mak-
ing contact between philosophical tradition and the concerns of
Formless. Philosophers d o not think that early childhood develop-
ment is relevant to epistemology. What counts, Quine suggests, is
the ways in which adults perceive the world. Normal perception is
by stable selves w h o view other such selves and objects. Klein de-
scribes a disturbed child she analyzed:
When, simultaneously with making phantasies, he took to playing.

. . . Usually it came finally to fights between Indians, robbers or peas-
ants on the one hand and soldiers on the other, whereupon the latter
were always represented by himself and his troops.
A n d she tells his dream:
where there were no doors to be seen and no ground all around about
it, and yet the windows were crowded with people. . . . It was a
phantasy of the maternal and paternal bodies as well as the wish for
the father At the end of this dream he is able to fly along, and with
the help of the other people... he locks the giant into the moving train
and flies away with the key.33
Is that experience relevant to understanding adult forms of knowing?

Richard Wollheim is a Kleinian, and so his book on F.H. Bradley
d r a w s an analogy between her w a y s of thinking and Bradley's: 34
The task that confronts the infant is to escape from, or at least to mod-
ify, the depressive anxiety that attends the awareness . . . of his own
destructive impulses.... In desperation he may try to split off the in-
jured from the undamaged part of the object, the impulses that he
dreads from those which he can control. . . . To achieve a permanent
lessening of his anxiety, the infant must be seized with the desire to
make reparation, to preserve or revive the loved and injured object. Is
it not in strikingly similar terms that the Monist characterizes the task
of metaphysics?
Philosophers were bewildered by this discussion.

Suppose that early childhood states—as described by Klein, or by
Jacques Lacan, w h o is quoted by Bois and Krauss—did have a last-
ing effect. Maybe it is impossible to understand adult k n o w i n g with-
out taking them into account. Then the mainline philosophical
tradition w o u l d seem overly narrow and extremely complacent. We

could not base epistemology on analysis of organized, harmonious
adults perceiving the world, but w o u l d need to look at childhood
psychology and at abnormal or pathological adult states.
In 1923 and 1924, Antonin Artaud wrote: 35
My thought abandons me at every level. . . . As soon as I can grasp a

form, however imperfect, I pin it down, for fear of losing the whole
thought....
The moment the soul is preparing to organize its wealth, its discover-
ies, this revelation, at that unconscious moment when the thing is on
the point of coming forth, a superior and evil will attacks the soul like
a poison, attacks the mass consisting of word and image.
What lessons m a y w e learn from him?

In his essay "Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent
Van Gogh," Georges Bataille argues that van Gogh's painting needs
to be understood in relation to "primitive" cultures. 36
The relations between this painter... and an ideal, of which the sun is
the most dazzling form, appear to be analogous to those that men
maintained at one time with their gods ... mutilation normally inter-
vened in these relations as sacrifice: it would represent the desire to
resemble perfectly an ideal term, generally characterized in mythol-
ogy as a solar god who tears and rips out his own organs.
Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari suggest that such extreme distur-

bances tell us about " n o r m a l " experience. The child's "finding in vi-
sual space a figure of coherence, balance and wholeness which will
model the possibility of subjective stability and will thus serve to
prefigure the T " is more precarious than w e normally recognize. 37
Most philosophers take for granted that extreme states are totally
alien to them, and so irrelevant to epistemology. If they read novels,
Jane Austen tells them w h a t everyday life is like. But literature offers
less sheltered perspectives. 3 8
I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how
I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind.
I was helped. I've never have got there alone. There's this man who
comes every week.
98 Rosalind Krauss
A n d of course m a n y recent writers h a v e built upon, a n d extended,

Samuel Beckett's presentation of extreme states. 39
He's cut His throat with the knife. He's near chopped off His hand
with the meat cleaver. He couldn't object so I lit a Silk Cut. A sort of
wave of something was going across me. There was fright but I'd day-
dreamed how I'd be.
N o sign here of Jane Austen.

David H u m e famously argues that w e possess n o idea of the self,
claiming that w e are
nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which suc-

ceed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual
flux and movement.... The mind is a kind of theatre, where several
perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide
away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.
H u m e ' s reasoning is very radical. If w e cannot have an idea of the

self, then w h a t knowledge is secure? But, h e continues:
I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with

my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I wou'd
return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ri-
diculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.40
For H u m e , as for most other major European philosophers before

Nietzsche, radical skepticism does not disrupt ordinary life.
One w a y to attack traditional philosophical theorizing, m u c h re-
cent feminist analysis has argued, is to critique its view of gender.
H u m e (and other philosophers) discusses the passions, b u t mostly
their claims can be presented without m u c h reference to gender.
"The elaboration of fetishism in relation to popular culture," Krauss
writes, involves 4 1
the visual Gestalt of the projected female body being the phallic
symptom of the viewer's castration anxiety: simultaneously the proof
of sexual difference and the site of its denial, since the woman's body,
frozen and remade into the elegant Gestalt of wholeness, would
thereby be "rephallicized" through the reassuring action of form.
If this w a y of thinking is correct—and her exposition is more than a

little obscure—then genders enter into the most basic definition of
selfhood. How men see depends on their awareness of not being

women.
Suppose we take skepticism about the unified stable self as seri-
ously as Lacan or Deleuze and Guattari. Consider the consequences
for philosophical art criticism. Greenberg's formalism depends on a
philosophy of mind Formless rejects. When in The Originality Krauss
presented the structuralist analysis, she offered an alternative to tra-
ditional art historical narratives. Her analysis did not depend explic-
itly on any broader philosophical claims, although it borrowed from
Foucault. Formless offers much more dramatic claims, arguing that
formalist ways of thinking, and so also Greenberg's ways of think-
ing about history, are fundamentally flawed. Krauss's claims, if true,
thus are very important. But Formless gives little constructive argu-
ment. The literature on Lacan presents elaborate argument about
details, but little discussion of the relationship between this way of
thinking and traditional commonsense views. To develop a serious
alternative to traditional philosophical accounts of experience and to
show the implications for an account of aesthetic experience would
be an enormous task.
Danto's aesthetic theory, clearly presented in the language of an-
alytic philosophy, is highly controversial.42 His historiography is
Hegelian, but he sets art within a traditional Cartesian way of think-
ing about philosophy. Formless makes much more radical claims,
but until this theorizing is linked to everyday ways of thinking, it is
likely to appear fanciful speculation to anyone unwilling to adopt
Lacanian ways of thinking. When my daughter Liz was nine
months old, I took a photograph of her looking at herself in a mirror,
and used it in a lecture, using discussion of the mirror stage as a li-
cense to fantasize. Most art historians who use Lacan's ideas speak
as if his far-reaching speculations were well-established fact.43 Phi-
losophers have posed many critical questions about Freud's theo-
rizing, but traditional psychoanalysis is only good common sense
compared with Lacan's commentaries. Lack of knowledge of, or
sympathy with, Lacan means that few American philosophers take
seriously Krauss's recent work. That is unfortunate, for she offers an
interesting deep challenge to our commonplace beliefs.44
Much recent art deals with dysfunction, obsession, and fragmen-
tation, treating the unified self as an impossibly Utopian ideal. It re-
jects the Kantian aspiration to universality—which is central to
Greenberg's formalism—in favor of concern with "division of gen-
der, race, culture, class, or ethnicity."45 As Danto goes on to say, "It is
100 Rosalind Krauss
exactly those factors which set the group apart in the image of itself
possessed by its members that theorists now insist must also belong
to the concrete self that is shaped by the group." 46 Suppose we re-
main skeptical of Bois's and Krauss's claim to undermine traditional
philosophical ways of thinking. Even if their general claims remain
unproven, Formless is essential for understanding 1990s art. To inter-
pret Kandinsky's paintings, we need to know the theosophical the-
ology that inspired him; to read Chinese paintings, we must learn
Buddhist nature philosophy. Analogously, many artists believe in
Bois's and Krauss's ways of thinking, so critics need Formless to un-
derstand this art. Bois and Krauss call Formless "a user's man-
ual"—they want that contemporary artists recognize in the book
articulation of pressing concerns.
Compare "Notes on the Index," Krauss's identification of the
structure of 1970s American art, with this account of 1990s art. How
much the visual culture has changed. "Notes on the Index" gives a
central role to a linguistic concept, the "shifter"—"that category of
linguistic sign which is 'filled with signification' only because it is
'empty.'" 47 Photography, she argues, is the indexical art, for "it oper-
ates to substitute the registration of sheer physical presence for the
more highly articulated language of aesthetic conventions." Para-
doxically, the literality of photography thus links it with abstract
paintings that signify directly what they physically are.48 The major
categories of Formless are base materialism, horizontally, pulse, and
entropy. Photography reappears, but in a different context. Like
"Notes on the Index," it refers to Lacan, but now using not his oppo-
sition between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, but his account of
how the subject "is himself fragmented and dispersed, caught up in
a system of displacements." 49 A central role now is given to the
part-objects which constitute the postmodern self.
As The Originality replaces the explanatory language of narrative
art history with structuralist terms, so Formless offers yet another
novel vocabulary. Leo Steinberg claims that postmodernism changes
"the psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative
confrontation. . . . I tend to regard the tile of the picture plane from
vertical to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in the
subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture." 50 Bois and
Krauss locate this break earlier, in Pollock's painting and surrealism;
and they find in a very early Walter Benjamin essay precedent for
Steinberg's analysis. Steinberg identifies the shift as moving from the
natural window of modernism to the horizontal culture. Bois and
Krauss move as far as possible from what we ordinarily identify as

culture. When "Other Criteria" identified the change from a vertical
and implied horizontal position with what "happened in painting
around 1950—most conspicuously (at least within my experience) in
the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Dubuffet," Steinberg implied
that Pollock's paintings are essentially verticals.51 His 1955 review,
"Pollock's First Retrospective," also republished in Other Criteria,
says nothing about Pollock's connection with the flatbed.
These differences between Steinberg and Bois/Krauss concern
points of detail. What matters most is the agreement that there is a
break associated with "horizontality." There is a distinction in kind52
between the "well-built" and the unconstructed, the former being ev-
erything man has fashioned to resist the dispersive force of grav-
ity—including, in the field of art, the stretchers that support canvas,
the armatures that hold up clay, and all the other rigid materials, from
marble to bronze, that are deployed. A function of the well-built/on?/
is thus vertical because it can resist gravity; what yields to gravity,
then, is anti-form.
In The Originality, Krauss identified this break with postmodernist

sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s; now, focused on surrealism, she
and Bois push this break back to an earlier moment.
Formless rewrites Art and Culture using the artworld vocabulary of
the 1990s. Like Greenberg, Bois and Krauss begin their history of
modernism with Manet. Giving surrealism a central role, they leave
cubism out of this story. Greenberg opposed kitsch to serious high art.
Bois and Krauss argue that kitsch is present within modernism. Like
Greenberg, they are concerned entirely with high art. Greenberg the
Marxist depended on dialectical oppositions. Following Bataille's
highly personal conception of materialism, Bois and Krauss would
transcend binary oppositions. Their antidevelopmental narrative is a
negation of Greenberg's Hegelian history of modernism. In radically
original prose, Bois and Krauss identify one of our dominant period
styles. Future historians who want to understand the reception of
Cindy Sherman and any number of other recent artists who develop
out of pop art and surrealism will find Formless of great interest. For
my present purposes, what is limited about the book as a contribution
to philosophical art history is its fatal closeness to Art and Cidture.
Bataille functions as Bois's and Krauss's anti-Thomas Steams Eliot,
offering very different perspectives on culture after World War I.
102 Rosalind Krauss
Eliot, a royalist, joined the Church of English; Bataille was fascinated

with eroticism, transgression, and violence. Bataille provides a way 5 3
to organize and restructure our understanding of more recent prac-

tices, beginning in the 1940s with Dubuffet's early materiological ex-
plorations, or jumping forward to watch the extinction of light in late
Rothko, or to witness the alignment of the body with the earth in the
sculpture of the last two decades.
H e provides a w a y to rewrite the history of modernism. The limita-

tion of Krauss's unsuccessful rivals, I argued earlier, is that in retro-
spect they appeal too fatally close to Greenberg. N o w the same thing
may be said about Krauss herself. Formless depends on mere nega-
tion of Greenberg's claims. W h a t is "the formless" if not the opposite
of formalism?
At some point even the most sympathetic interpreter reaches his
limits. W h e n in his Jean-Paul Sartre Danto comes to The Critique of Di-
alectical Reason, he has little to say. I admire Krauss almost as m u c h as
he admires Sartre, b u t w h e n I come to her discussion of Georges
Bataille, then I have relatively little to say.
Bataille's novel The Story of the Eye presents graphic violence. O n e
y o u n g w o m a n kills herself; the characters go to Spain, they m u r d e r a
priest, and "on the fourth day, at Gibraltar, the Englishman pur-
chased a yacht, and w e set sail t o w a r d s n e w s adventures with a crew
of Negroes." 5 4 Barthes writes that "Bataille's eroticism is essentially
metonymic . . . by . virtue of their metaphorical dependence eye, sun
and egg are closely b o u n d u p with the genital; by virtue of their
metonymic freedom they endlessly exchange meanings and us-
ages. " 5 5 His esoteric analysis shows an amazing lack of common-
sense feeling for the story.
Krauss's account of female n u d e s in surrealism faces similar
problems. Surrealism, she says, 56
can be said to have explored the possibility of a sexuality that is not

grounded in an idea of human nature, or the natural, but instead, wo-
ven of fantasy and representation, is fabricated. Having dissolved the
natural in which "normalcy" can be grounded, surrealism was at
least potentially open to the dissolving of distinctions that Bataille in-
sisted was the job of the informe.
Unable to imagine h o w these pictures could possibly have such a

role, I agree, rather, with Danto: 5 7
In these photographs, women are shown twisted, chained, stripped,

hooded, bound, broken, their sexes splayed. To say that by virtue of
having been selected as a system of signs, woman has been lifted out
of the plane of sexuality and onto the place of discourse, where she is
no longer a natural object, is to allow critical intelligence to be
swamped by bad theory.
Once in a m e n ' s magazine, I found the p h o t o g r a p h of a n u d e

stretched out over an African sculpture, a picture similar to one
Krauss reproduces. (Perhaps the photographer had studied surreal-
ism, or m a y b e he k n e w her book.) I w o u l d not be tempted to analyze
this arousing picture using Krauss's semiotic analysis. The surrealist
female n u d e s Krauss presents, more aesthetic than commonplace
pornography, are not very different. Saying this is not to moralize
about pornography, b u t only to observe that Krauss's analysis is
hopelessly counterintuitive. Only a formalist could take Barthes's
view of The Story of the Eye or Krauss's perspective on surrealist p h o -
tography. 58 Krauss takes toward surrealism the attitude Barthes
took toward Sade's pornography: 5 9
For Sade, there is no eroticism unless the crime is "reasoned"; to reason

means to philosophize... to subject crime... to a system of articulated
language; but is also means to combine according to precise rules the
specific actions of vice, so as to make from these series and groups of
actions a new "language," no longer spoken but acted; a "language"
of crime.
Only a formalist could read Sade as a philosopher of language. N o

serious political activist could take this attitude.
One goal of the philosophical art criticism is to critically discuss
the relationship between art and morality. In her recent work,
Krauss fails to d o this. Bois's and Krauss's fascination with blood,
dirt, m u d , shit, spit, and other formless things marks them as aes-
thetes. They are interested in h o w such "low" things can m a k e their
way into the artworld. In that way, their concerns converge with
Danto's explanation of h o w Warhol's Brillo Box became an artwork.
When worthless informal things become art, they are transfigured.
Claes Oldenberg's ray guns, Robert Morris's felt, a n d Ed Ruscha's
p h o t o g r a p h s of city lots have become precious artifacts displayed in
well-guarded m u s e u m s . Bois and Krauss substantiate, but do not
extend, Danto's analysis of this transposition of the banal.
104 Rosalind Krauss
This most recent stage in the development of Krauss's thought is

best u n d e r s t o o d allegorically. W h e n October w a s founded, it w a s not
absurd to h o p e for an alliance between radical avant-garde art a n d
leftist political movements. Krauss a n d her colleagues aimed to
build bridges between the art they admired and political protest, as
h a p p e n e d in the October revolution. But the total disappearance of
c o m m u n i s m in the late 1990s a n d the absolute w o r l d w i d e domi-
nance of capitalism h a v e m a d e such Utopian w a y s of thinking obso-
lete. In the 1970s, Tim Clark asked, "[H]ow could there be an
effective political art? Is not the whole thing a chimera, a dream, in-
compatible with the basic conditions of artistic production in the
nineteenth c e n t u r y . . . . Could there be any such thing as revolution-
ary art until the m e a n s existed—briefly, abortively—to change those
basic conditions." 6 0
A n d Clark added: 6 1
"Yes! Long live the Revolution!"
"Still! In spite of everything!"
These are Courbet's instructions to the connoisseur, and Baudelaire's

to himself, in 1865. They don't seem to me to have dated.
N o w they are dated, as Clark's recent book on m o d e r n i s m makes

clear. Clark claims that "the question of h o w an artist should re-
s p o n d to revolution remains unsolved." 6 2 His question, so impor-
tant in the era w h e n Krauss broke with Greenberg, today is merely of
historical fascination. As Clark notes, aesthetes often are problem-
atic political activists. Baudelaire's keenest desire in the revolution
of 1848 w a s to shoot his father-in-law. W h e n Krauss's recent writ-
ings a b a n d o n the political ambitions that inspired her a n d the other
Octoberists, she responds in an authentic w a y to the changed art and
culture.
Reading Formless, I momentarily identify with Erwin Panofsky
w h e n he refused to interpret the "magnificent nightmares a n d day-
d r e a m s " of Jerome Bosch, quoting instead A d e l p h u s Muelich: 63
This, too high for my wit,

I prefer to omit.
But w h o k n o w s w h a t I a m missing? 6 4
In evaluating a perspective, we must always ask, "To whose life does

it contribute?" There is absolutely no reason to think that a perspec-
tive that is good for one type of person will also be good for an-
other—not to speak of "all others."
In rejecting Krauss's perspective, I can speak only for myself. You

may find it of passionate interest.
For me, the perfect characterization of Krauss's style of philo-
sophical art criticism comes in Diderot's Rameaus Nephew when the
philosopher describes the nephew: 65
He is a compound of the highest and the lowest, good sense and folly.
The notions of good and evil must be strangely muddled in his head,
for the good qualities nature has given him he displays without osten-
tation, and the bad ones without shame. Moreover he is blessed with a
strong constitution, a singularly fervid imagination and lung-power
quite out of the ordinary. If you ever run into him and his originality
does not hold your interest, you will either stuff your fingers into
your ears or run away.
Were Krauss to present the theorizing of Formless as a fantasy, I

would have boundless admiration for her bold ingenuity. But I fear
that she takes her claims literally. In my recent book on Baudelaire's
art criticism, I ask to what extent we may learn from him "while ad-
mitting that sometimes his ways of thinking are positively repug-
nant."66 I would now ask the same question about Krauss. But here,
again, my perspective is personal and so no doubt subjective.
NOTES
1. Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User's
Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 64.
Viking Press, 1977), p. 204.
3. See Krauss's "Using Language to Do Business as Usual," in
Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Mi-
chael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (London: PlarperCollins, 1991),
pp. 79-94.
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 58 n. 25.
5. See my "American-Type Formalism," in Aesthetics: A Critical
Anthology (New York, 1977), pp. 461-469; and my Poussin s Paint-
106 Rosalind Krauss
ings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology (University Park: Univer-

sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), chap. 3.
6. Fried, Art and Objecthood, p. 168.
vid Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 37.
8. "Stella's New Work and the Problem of Series," Artforum
(December 1971): 44.
9. See Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and
p. 30.
11. Ibid., pp. 72, 75, 77, 218.
12. Krauss has noted that "Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's seminal
interpretation of cubism" borrows from "structuralizing art history
in Germany" ("1959, 9 January, The Ministry of Fate," in A New
History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1989), p. 1003). See also Yve-Alain Bois,
"Kahnweiler's Lesson," in his Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1990), pp. 65-97.
13. A different perspective on Krauss's use of Pollock is found in
James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge,
MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
14. Krauss's semiotic theory was anticipated in her 1972 catalog
essay on Joan Miro, which refers in passing to Nelson Goodman
and Michael Foucault. Miro was interested "in Medieval Catalan
fresco painting, where depth is symbolized in the flat rather than
absorbed into a system of illusion"—the concern of Picasso in the
cubist works Krauss analyzes ("Magnetic Fields: The Structure,"
Joan Miro: Magnetic Fields [New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation, 1972], p. 16). Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois acknowledge
(Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign," in Picasso and Braque: A Sym-
posium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky [New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1992], p. 283 n. 8) the essential assistance of an unpublished lecture
by Leo Steinberg, first given in 1974.
15. Krauss and Bois, "The Motivation," pp. 287, 262.
16. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, p. 33.
17. Krauss and Bois, "The Motivation," p. 262.
18. Ibid., pp. 263, 302.
19. See my "Painting as Performance Art: The Case of Picasso,"
in Picasso. Graphic Magician. Prints from the Norton Simon Museum
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University," 1998), pp. 75-96.
20. Much of the discussion of "The Motivation" revolves around

debate about the extent of Picasso's knowledge of Mallarme's po-
etry, a tangential issue.
21. "We Lost It at the Movies," Art Bulletin 76, 4 (December
1994): 580. As she indicates, this strategy required more motivation
than was provided in The Optical Unconscious.
22. See Norman Bryson, Word & Image: French Painting of the An-
cien Regime (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1981),
chap. 1.
23. Norman Bryson, "The Politics of Arbitrariness," in Visual
Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael
Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 97.
24. A usefully brief account of semiotics in relation to surrealism
appears in Krauss's "Nightwalkers," Art Journal 41,1 (spring 1981):
33-38.
25. Andrew Forge, "Painting and the Struggle for the Whole
Self," Artforum 14,1 (September 1975): 48.
26. Krauss and Bois, Formless, p. 90.
27. Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World-Order: Outline of a
Theory of Knowledge (1929; reprint, New York: Dover, 1956), p. 38.
28. Willard van Orman Quine, Word & Object (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1960), pp. 4-5.
29. Roger Fry, Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on
Art (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 8.
30. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.
Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 2.
32. Hanna Segal, in Klein (Glasgow: Fontana Collins, 1979), sum-
marizes her ideas.
33. Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 1921-1945
(London: Hogarth Press, 1968), pp. 51, 57.
34. Richard Wollheim, F.H. Bradley, 2d ed. (Baltimore, MD: Pen-
guin, 1969), pp. 278-279.
35. Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans.
Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 31,
45.
36. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and
Donald M. Leslie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985),
p. 66.
108 Rosalind Krauss
37. Krauss and Bois, Formless, p.89.

38. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (Molloy), trans. Patrick Bowles
with the author (1955; reprint, New York: Grove, 1965), p. 7.
39. Alan Warner, Morvern Callar (New York: Anchor, 1995), p. 1.
40. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1896), pp. 252-253, 269.
42. See my "Indiscernibles and the Essence of Art: The Hegelian
Turn in Arthur Danto's Aesthetic Theory," forthcoming in the Li-
brary of Living Philosophers volume devoted to Danto.
43. My "Art History in the Mirror Stage. Interpreting Un Bar aux
Folies-Bergere" History and Theory, 29, 3 (1990): 297-320, is repub-
lished in 12 Views of Manet's Bar, ed. Bradford Collins (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 71-90, Most of the essays
in this volume discuss the mirror stage. Mirrors are discussed in
empirical ways in Jonathan Miller, On Reflection (London: National
Gallery, 1998).
44. What might add to the plausibility of Krauss's recent theo-
rizing is the extension of her account backward historically, to deal
also with old master art. Formless has some suggestive remarks
about Caravaggio. A fuller account appears in Leo Bersani and
Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio's Secrets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1998).
45. Arthur C. Danto, Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), p. 137.
46. Ibid.
47. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 197, 209.
48. Lucio Pozzi, her example of such an abstractionist, became a
figurative artist.
MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 84.
51. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, pp. 84, 263-267.
53. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Antivision," October 36 (spring 1986):
154.
54. Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye by Lord Auch, trans.
Joachim Neugroschel (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin,
1982), p. 67. A fuller sample of Bataille's ideas appears in his Eroti-
cism: Death & Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (1962; reprint, San
Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1986). See also Krauss's "Michel,

Bataille et moi," October 68 (spring 1994): 3-20.
55. Barthes, "The Metaphor of the Eye," p. 125.
56. Rosalind E. Krauss with Jane Livingston, LAmour fou: Pho-
tography & Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), p. 95. This
way of looking at photography is anticipated by her earlier discus-
sion, which draws a parallel with collage; "Irving Penn: 'Earthly
Bodies,'" Arts Magazine 55, 1 (September 1980): 84-86. A sympa-
thetic reading of Krauss's writings on surrealism appears in Hal
Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), Pref-
ace.
57. Arthur C. Danto, Review of V Amour fou, The Print Collector's
Newsletter 17,1 (March-April 1986): 67.
58. Bois thinks like a formalist in describing Picasso's Nude in a
Garden (1934).
She is both an ovoid and a Mobis strip, her limbs curled up against her
but never hiding anything: breasts, navel, sex, anus, all are visible,
and the continuity of her curves appeals to our sense of touch.
Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), p. 102.
59. Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Layola, trans. Richard Miller
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), p. 27.^
60. T.J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France
1848-1851 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 179.
61. T.J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848
Revolution (London: Thames and Fludson, 1973), p. 161.
62. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois, p. 182.
63. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and
Character (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 357-358.
64. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault
(Berkeley: University of California, 1998), p. 149.
65. Denis Diderot, Rameaus Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream,
trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1966), pp. 33-34.
66. High Art. Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism.
(University Park: Penn State Press, 1996), p. 11.
AFTERWORD
The Fate of Philosophical

Art Criticism
The artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will
have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declara-
tions take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the
primers of Art History.
Marcel Duchamp
The artwriter too may shout that he is a genius, but he also needs to
wait for the verdict of readers in order that his claims are taken seri-
ously. Now when we have a picture of Krauss's development, it is
time to evaluate her achievement. What has she accomplished?
A successful philosophical art critic projects an interpretation of
his period style, getting his contemporaries to see art through his
eyes. Greenberg did this. Krauss, his most important successor,
should be evaluated by the same standard. Krauss's dream (and
mine) is that philosophical art criticism be intellectually demanding.
Contemporary art should be discussed with the same conviction
and intelligence as the old masters. Krauss's nightmare (and mine) is
that art criticism be merely promotional writing, the art critic just a
servant of the art market. She (and I) want art criticism to be more
than mere journalist reporting. We want art criticism to make a dif-
ference. Are our hopes justified?
112 Rosalind Krauss
A philosophical art critic often presents complex theorizing, but if

his work is to have any impact, it must be popularized. Few of Fry's
contemporaries understood the nuances of his account of the aes-
thetic attitude, but everyone could see the importance of his champi-
oning of Cezanne. The details of Greenberg's historiography are
academic, but it is easy to grasp his claim that Pollock takes up the
modernist tradition. Danto's argument that the history of art has
ended is esoteric, but his way of thinking is associated with the
postmodern museum. The museum expanded by identifying new
kinds of art, but now when growth ends, that institution will change,
in ways Danto's writing may help us understand.
Some of Krauss's concerns no longer remain of interest. The leftist
political protest art, which was one starting point for October, looks to
be a dead end. And her structuralist critique of autobiographical art
history, which grew out of her reading of Barthes and Foucault on the
"death of the author," is obviously counterintuitive. Picasso was the
most autobiographical of artists, the man whose life is being so fully
documented by John Richardson—who could think his life irrelevant
to his art? But these are points of detail. The larger question, yet unan-
swered, is whether her ways of thinking will become popularized.
Art writers are rhetoricians, for they practice interpretation by de-
scription. 1 When, for example, Bernard Berenson says that
Caravaggio's Madonna di Loreto "stoops" toward the pilgrims "but
seems to feel the burden of the Holy Child's weight as He blesses,"
this is such an interpretation. 2 In the next three sentences, Berenson
compares this image with paintings by Murillo and Velasquez. His
seemingly unassuming account carries real art historical weight.
Most art writers, Michael Baxandall's fifteenth-century humanists
as much as critics in Artforum, do interpretation by description.
In rejecting formalism and presenting her antiformalist narrative
in Passages, then the structuralist analysis in The Originality of the
Avant-Garde, and, finally, deconstructing structuralism in her
semiotic account of cubism and Formless, Krauss projects a sequence
of interpretations by description. Are these interpretations true? It is
important that none of them depend centrally on demonstrable
falsehoods, but Krauss aims to be convincing, plausible, and sugges-
tive. Her concerns thus differ from a philosopher's. Wittgenstein re-
jected the analysis of language in his Tractatus in favor of the account
of Philosophical Investigations because he identified errors in his early
book. Krauss's new interpretative approaches supersede her earlier
ways of thinking because she responds to novel art.
Afterword 113
Interpretation by description tells what perspective to take on a

painting. Thomas Crow writes of A n d y Warhol's Marilyn Diptychs
(1962), 3
lays out a stark and unresolved dialectic of presence and absence, of

life and death. . . .The left-hand side is a monument; color and life are
restored, but as a secondary and unchanging mask added to some-
thing far more fugitive. Against the quasi-official regularity and uni-
formity of the left panel, the right concedes the absence of its subject,
openly displaying the elusive and uninformative trace underneath.
His distinction in kind between Warhol's early art which "fosters

critical or subversive apprehension of mass culture and the power of
the image as commodity," and his later, more commercial work, sets
Warhol's individual pictures in an account of stylistic development.
In Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, Tim Clark writes, 4
the girl in the mirror does seem to be part of some ... facile narrative.
. . . But that cannot be said of the "real" barmaid, who stands at the
centre, returning our gaze with such evenness, such seeming lack of
emotion or even interest.
There is a gentleman in the mirror. . . . Who is this unfortunate, pre-

cisely? Where is he? Where does he stand in relation to her, in relation
to us?
Sydney Freedberg describes a n o t h e r picture w i t h mirror, the

Parmigianino Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror (1524, Vienna):5
Into this demonstration of illusionistic realism, and actually dominat-
ing its effect, are intermingled other motives.... There is the very fact
that he has chosen, as the basis for this scientific demonstration, an ex-
treme complication of a problem in realistic representation. . . . It is
true that Francesco has counterfeited a real image on his panel, and
that he has done so with remarkable scientific truth. But though the
counterfeit is visually exact as a rendering of a thing seen, the thing
seen is not in itself an ordinary image, but a singular distortion of ob-
jective normalcy.
If w e see these paintings as Clark and Freedberg describe them, then

we judge their accounts to be convincing, plausible, and suggestive.
It is not a matter of fact that interpretations by description are true
or false. An interpretation by description, which fails to be persua-
114 Rosalind Krauss
sive, is like a joke that isn't funny or a metaphor that is not illuminat-
ing. We cannot know a priori if an interpretation, joke, or metaphor
will be convincing.6 Only the public response shows which jokes,
metaphors, or interpretations work. Nietzsche's perspectivism, per-
haps problematic philosophically, is a superlatively acute descrip-
tion of art criticism.7
Let us be on guard against the danger old conception fiction that pos-
ited a "pure, will-less, aimless, timeless knowing subject.... There is
only a perspective knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak
about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe
one thing, the more complete will our concept of this thing, our "ob-
jectivity" be.
Each perspective provides a viewpoint yielding insights unobtain-

able from other vantage points. Interpretation by description, an
open-ended process, offers one perspective, while implying that al-
ternative interpretative points of view are possible. Were it possible
to describe the painting as it really is, then there could not be legiti-
mate disagreements among commentators. But because the goal is
to get us to see according to an interpretation, the painting may con-
vincingly be described in more than one way An artwriter can be
both strongly committed to his interpretation and recognize that le-
gitimate alternative points of view are possible. We both believe that
we have advanced beyond our ancestors and anticipate that our suc-
cessors will find plausible ways, today as yet unimagined, to inter-
pret the art we describe.
Nothing in the writings of Descartes, Hume, or Wittgenstein di-
rectly affects public life. (The political writings of Locke and Kant af-
fected public life.) If the argument of Descartes' Meditations are
correct, then those who perform the act of meditating return to ordi-
nary everyday experience knowing that their prephilosophical be-
liefs are justified. Busy, practical men are not likely to take the time
for such meditations. In the preface to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein
says that the goal of his book "would be achieved if it gave pleasure
to one person who read and understood it."8 An ambitious art critic
would not say that. When Greenberg's ways of thinking became
generally accepted, museums everywhere sought Pollocks and Da-
vid Smiths. Because now an anti-Greenbergian vision of
postmodernist art has triumphed, exhibitions of contemporary art
in New York, as in Pittsburgh, Sydney, Wellington, and Stockholm,
Afterword 115
are organized differently.9 Art criticism changes how contemporary

art is displayed, sold, and written about. This is why we value critics,
in some degree, according to their capacity to convince their con-
temporaries to accept their way of thinking. If Descartes' epistemol-
ogy is false, it requires revision. Indeed, the entire history of
post-Cartesian philosophy is a sequence of radical rethinkings of his
epistemology. Philosophical art criticism has different goals, and so
a different history. We do not admire Krauss because we think she
has shown the arguments of Fry and Greenberg to be false. (In The
Optical Unconscious she says she can do that, but to take her claims at
face value is to misunderstand her accomplishment.) We admire her
because she has developed an original novel interpretative strategy.
Philosophical art critics deal not with reality, but with appear-
ances. If someone is thought attractive or witty, then they are. With
appearances there is no distinction between how things seem to be
and how they actually are. But if someone is generally thought to be
born in Berlin, it is possible, still, that they really were born in Lon-
don. The fact may not ever be known. Appearances are defined by
consensus, and those conventions change. When feminists warn
that fashionably thin models encourage teenage anorexia, they ask
that styles of sexual attractiveness change. Chris Rock tells jokes
which would astonish his precursors—Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce,
the Marx Brothers, Oscar Wilde. Testing the limits of acceptable pub-
lic speech, the successful humorist learns how far to go, and when to
stop. Styles of humor change with the times, for what is funny de-
pends on an implicit social agreement.
Crow or Clark or Freedberg might legitimately be compared with
novelists. Just as Jane Austen, George Eliot, or Virginia Woolf present
fictional worlds—ways of seeing that we find compelling—so too
artwriters get us to see art according to their interpretation. This is
the difference: The novelist constructs a fictional world; the artwriter
describes real objects. Discovery of facts is important. Knowing that
Rembrandt's Stockholm masterpiece The Conspiracy of Claudius
Civilis: The Oath (1661-1662) was cut down is essential to interpreta-
tion.10 But it is not a matter of fact that Warhol "lays out a stark and
unresolved dialectic of presence and absence"; that Manet's "girl in
the mirror does seem to be part of some... facile narrative"; or that in
Paramigianino's picture "the thing seen is not in itself an ordinary
image, but a singular distortion of objective normalcy."11 It is not
self-evidently mistaken to deny any of these claims. Indeed, it would
be instructive to compose counterinterpretations denying them.
116 Rosalind Krauss
Warhol's, Manet's, and Parmigianino's paintings were not always

seen thus.
How does a style of interpretation catch on and become almost
common sense? A great interpreter responds to a shared climate of
opinion, defined in part by his writing. Tim Clark's account of Manet
very self-consciously projects on late nineteenth-century Paris
left-wing social concerns of the 1960s. It is not necessary to share an
artwriter's beliefs to admire his or her interpretations. Looking at
Marilyn Diptych, I forget my problems with Crow's political claims
and admire him for offering a highly suggestive approach to a puz-
zling painting. Often there seems, at least in retrospect, a natural
match between a gifted interpreter and the paintings he describes.
Freedberg's finely polished prose is a natural match to Self-Portrait in
a Convex Mirror. (Who can imagine him, Bostonian-born with a
self-consciously artificial English accent, admiring Andy Warhol?)
Unlike Freedberg, Krauss is not a literary writer. Rejecting traditional
aesthetics, she rejects also that fine writing associated with humanist
tradition. Perhaps because we tend to focus on very successful inter-
pretations, we tend too easily to forget how much skill successful in-
terpretation by description demands. Much is to be learned by
considering interpretations that fail. Like jokes that aren't funny, un-
convincing interpretations quickly drop out of circulation.
Philosophical art criticism has lost much of its prestige. The critic
and former art dealer Dave Hickey, reflecting on his own experience
selling art, writes, "Everyone in this culture understands the freedom
and permission of art's mandate. . . . Art ain't rocket science, and be-
yond a proclivity to respond and permission to do so, there are no
prerequisites for looking at it."12 He expresses, no doubt in exagger-
ated fashion, the frustrations many people have with such theorizing.
A great deal can be learned by studying the changing styles of the
most prestigious American commercial journal, Artforum. In its ear-
lier years, through to the late 1970s, the magazine focused on con-
temporary art in relation to early modernism. Today, as editor Jack
Bankowsky has defined his program, Artforum's themes are very
different:13
I do not believe that we can maintain a valid relationship to art with-

out attending to the larger realm of visual culture, the advent of tech-
nologies, the movements of peoples, the broader field that has come
to be called cultural studies.
Afterword 117
As often happens, expansion in one direction involves contrac-

tion in another. This willful determination to eliminate boundaries
setting high art apart from popular culture comes at a price, that is,
exclusion of historical issues. Artforum now responds to major
retrospectives of modernists, but otherwise takes little interest in
early modernism. Commentary about living artists is concerned
with their relation to contemporary culture, less concerned than in
the past to identify historically distant precedents. 14
Art and Culture treats contemporary high art historically, setting it
apart from the broader culture. Employing a very different concep-
tual framework, Formless: A User's Guide does the same. Cultural
studies replaces concern with modernist tradition with discussion of
advertising, fashion, gay studies, media images, multiculturalism,
and pop music. Andy Warhol is influential because his career can be
readily discussed in these terms. Holistic accounts setting individual
artworks within the broader culture have replaced formalism.
The origin of academic culture studies might be associated with
Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), with his dis-
cussion of English pop culture, and the crossover of black youth
styles in dress and music into white culture. In some ways, this way
of thinking was anticipated also by Andre Malraux's "museum
without walls," with artifacts from every culture reproduced in pho-
tographs.15 Cultural studies owe much to Roland Barthes's essays
collected in 1953 in Writing Degree Zero, translated into English only
in 1967, whose fascination with popular culture was shared by T.S.
Eliot, to various 1960s intellectuals' love for rock music, and to Tom
Wolfe's oddly prescient essays of that decade. And looking further
back, in Baudelaire's "The Painting of Modern Life" Constantin
Guys "watches the river of life flow past him in all its splendour and
majesty.... marvels at the eternal beauty and the amazing harmony
of life in the capital cities ... gazes upon the ... landscapes of stone.
... delights in fine carriages and proud horses," 16 and is inspired by
the poetic possibilities of banal everyday life.
Faced with any major stylistic change, historians seek to under-
stand that development. The swift move from Raphael's High Re-
naissance synthesis to Pontormo's mannerism or the rise of cubism
calls for explanation. How might we understand this change in
Artforum? I do not believe that artwriting has changed just because
art itself has changed. Artforum has changed much more radically
than most of the art it describes. Many precedents may be found for
most of the most novel-seeming art of the 1990s, but it is harder to
118 Rosalind Krauss
find anticipations of the newer styles of artwriting. Artforum now is

different because Greenberg's conception of a modernist tradition
extending back to Manet has become problematic. Having lost the
capacity or desire to think historically, commentators on contempo-
rary art focus intently on the present. When in her structuralist
phase Krauss translated historical narratives into Greimas dia-
grams, she anticipated this development. Treating the possible
artforms as all potentially present, here and now, is to treat this
structure aesthetically. When she and Bois attacked Greenberg's
concept of kitsch, they acknowledged (but did not embrace) the pos-
sibility of collapsing distinctions between high art and popular cul-
ture. She is less radical than her colleagues in cultural studies, whose
ambition is to treat art of all eras as art of the present, abolishing all
distinctions between high and low.
Cultural studies is less a theory about visual art than an attitude
toward the world, a sense of how to enjoy what Baudelaire identi-
fied as the presence of what is here and now.17 It is the attitude of
anyone who enjoys being on a crowded street—it is the felt sense
that experience of the art in New York galleries is incomplete with
turning also to the sounds and visual spectacle outside. The world is
viewed aesthetically without making any distinctions or value judg-
ments. "The Truth is the Whole," which to say that in the fullest in-
terpretation of contemporary art, no part of its context can be
omitted. This is not a novel form of philosophical art criticism, for
this practice is not in need of theoretical justification. That perhaps
makes it appropriate that the writer I associate with this way of look-
ing is not an academic, but the editor of Artforum. "The real Warhol
'trick,'" Bankowsky wrote in 198918
was that he (w)as able to maintain under the sign of art a whole sphere
of activity that traditionally defied that designation. [Our responsibil-
ity] is to write into history those parts of his endeavor—all the instru-
ments and strategies of his self-promotional enterprise—that
museum culture inevitably obscures.
Bankowsky's Warhol is quite different from Krauss's. Does he pro-

vide a superior perspective? The Political Unconscious asserts that the
artwriter must struggle against her precursors, making present
what they repressed. Bankowsky's Warhol makes use, in seemingly
unenvious ways, of materials at hand in his culture. He finds "mod-
ern life" beautiful because it is totally present—nothing is repressed,
Afterword 119
remaining hidden. This is of course an illusion, but it is the aesthetic

illusion upon which Warhol builds. He makes of himself a work of
art—incorporating into that total artwork which is his life the silly,
frivolous, and mean, as much as the gentler and nobler aspects of
himself.
Recently Bankowsky has noted: "One of the side effects of
Warhol's superadequacy to our moment is that the mirror he holds
up seems to accommodate everything in its proximity."19 Danto's
claim that Warhol was a great philosopher seemed absurd to some
critics.20
He turned the world we share into art, and turned himself into part of
that world, and because we are the images we hold in common with
everyone else, he became part of us ... if you want to know who Andy
Warhol is, look within.
I think, rather, that Danto's claim is very plausible, for here the art
of living, that ancient ideal recently discussed by Alexander
Nehamas, finds a new exemplification. Unlike professional academ-
ics, Nehamas's philosophers of living—Montaigne, Nietzsche, and
Foucault—are centrally involved not in making assertions, but in
"the construction of character."21 We create a self, Nehamas says, by
integrating the materials supplied by accident with "others ac-
quired and constructed on the way." Nehamas the aesthete de-
scribes the creation of a self as an act of someone who thus becomes
an individual. And that is exactly what Danto's posthistorical
Warhol accomplishes. But where Nehamas focuses on the unique in-
dividuality of each person practicing the art of living, Danto notes
the ways in which Warhol gets each of us to see ourselves in his art.
This difference in emphasis perhaps is one identifying feature of
posthistorical art, which modifies—but does not efface—the tradi-
tional character of aesthetic experience.22 Is it possible, still, to speak
of beauty in our era of antiaesthetic art? That question remains to be
answered by art writers of the future.
In 1987, in a blurb for my book Artwriting, a commentary on an ear-
lier era of American art writing, Danto wrote, "It is remarkable, the
degree to which Carrier has taken what one would have supposed
ephemeral and occasional—the literature of art criticism—and given
it a philosophical wreight and an almost epic dimension." Is it not
striking, how that story continues? It is as yet too soon to understand
the fate of philosophical art criticism. Will Danto's argument that the
120 Rosalind Krauss
history of art has ended be judged more convincing than Krauss's

historicist account of art's essence? Might Bankowsky's adaptation
of cultural studies provide a better perspective than Krauss's recent
theorizing? Or perhaps some other, as yet unrecognized, theorizing
may provide the best view of our era. However this conflict of inter-
pretations is resolved, Krauss has posed serious questions demand-
ing reflective response. But here an historical perspective is essential
if we are to evaluate her achievement.
We are fascinated by Diderot's fantasy of walking into Vernet's
landscape paintings, which allowed that critic to engage in elaborate
philosophical reveries having little to do with Vernet. We appreciate
Baudelaire's fantasies about the beauty of representations of the
present, and his love for Delacroix, without moralizing about his
misanthropy and misogyny. And we read attentively Roger Fry's
worries about the aesthetic value of Cezanne's nudes—as distract-
ing to a formalist, he complains, as erotic Hindu temple sculp-
ture—without necessarily rejecting his analysis. In admiring these
artwriters, we do not demand that their claims be evaluated in a literal-
minded way. If truth is what you seek, then turn away from
artwriting and read philosophy. Great critics have always been as in-
volved with fantasy as the art they discuss. And modern art history,
Paul Barolsky writes, 23
is far more deeply imaginative than most art historians recognize or

are willing to admit... art history, despite its efforts to reject the poeti-
cal, belongs, if unwittingly, to the imaginative tradition of writing
about art that descends from Homer and Vasari. In the study of liter-
ary genres, it should be categorized under historical fiction.
Why then, when we take this view of the great art writers of the past,
should we be unwilling to read Rosalind Krauss in an equally chari-
table way? In admiring her fantasies, but refusing to take them liter-
ally, I am only adopting a consistent attitude toward all creative art
writing. Whatever the ultimate judgment on her claims, her devel-
o p m e n t over t h r e e d e c a d e s from f o r m a l i s m to b e y o n d
postmodernism is a very remarkable intellectual journey. No one
has moved as quickly, no one else has offered so many challenging
arguments. That is why Krauss is our greatest philosophical art
critic.
Afterword 121
NOTES
1. See my High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modern-
ism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996),
chap. 4.
2. Bernard Berenson, Caravaggio: hlis Incongruity and His Fame
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1953), p. 27.
3. Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Fla-
ven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 53, 49.
4. T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet
and His Follozuers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 250.
5. S.J. Freedberg, Parmigianino: His Works in Painting (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 104.
6. See George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason:
A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989).
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 119.
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans.
D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (1921; reprint, London: Routledge,
1962), p. 3.
9. See my reviews: "Pittsburgh. 1985 Carnegie International,"
Burlington Magazine (January 1986): 63; "Carnegie International,"
Arts (February 1992): 69; "Sydney. 10th Biennale," Burlington Maga-
zine (October 1996): 714-715; "The World Over, City Gallery,
Wellington," Artforum (February 1997): 99; "New York, Whitney
Biennial and Other Shows," Burlington Magazine (May 1997):
350-352; "Stockholm. Wounds, between Democracy and Redemp-
tion in Contemporary Art. Moderna Museet," Artforum (October
1998: 134-135.
10. See Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985), pp. 319-320.
11. Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture, p. 53; Clark, The
Painting of Modern Life, p. 250; Freedberg, Parmigianino, p. 104.
12. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Los An-
geles: Art Issues Press, 1997), p. 107.
13. Jack Bankowsky, "Editor's Letter," Artforum (September
1993): 3. See my "Artforum, Andy Warhol and the Art of Living:
What Art Educators Can Learn from the Recent History of Ameri-
can Art Writing," journal of Aesthetic Education, forthcoming.
122 Rosalind Krauss
14. Compare Krauss's "Welcome to the Cultural Revolution,"

October 77 (summer 1996): 83-96.
15. See Krauss's "1959, 9 January, The Ministry of Fate," in A
New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1000-1006.
16. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Es-
says, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 11.
17. I discuss this conception of presence in my High Art, chap. 3.
18. His review is reprinted in The Critical Response to Andy
Warhol, ed. Alan R. Pratt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997),
p. 210. See also my "Andy Warhol's Moving Pictures of Modern
Life," Source 16, 3 (spring 1997): 30-34; and "Warhol and Cindy
Sherman. The Self Portrait in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion," Source 17,1 (fall 1998): 36-40.
19. Jack Bankowsky, Editor's Note, Artforum (January 1998): 6.
20. Arthur C. Danto, Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), p. 83.
21. Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections
from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), pp. 3,4.
22. This paragraph draws upon Nehamas's 1999 lecture "'The
Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters/"
23. Paul Barolsky, "Art History as Fiction," Artibus et historiae 34
(1997): 17.
Index
Abstract Expressionism, 1, 3,17-18,19, 10-11,12,119; structuralist art his-

20 tory, 44-46; surrealism, 102-103;
Artaud, Antonin, 97 Warhol's intentions, 48
Artforum, 23, 27,116-118 David, Jacques-Louis, 24
Davis, Whitney, 24
Bankowsky, Jack, 118-119 de Duve, Thierry, 55
Bann, Stephen, 73 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix,
Barolsky, Paul, 120 95-96, 99
Barthes, Roland, 57, 93,102,103
Descartes, Rene, 60, 89,114,115
Bataille, Georges, 9, 97, 101-102
Dickie, George, 61-62
Baudelaire, Charles, 117, 118,120
Diderot, Denis, 105,120
Benjamin, Walter, 100-101
Berenson, Bernard, 112 Duchamp, Marcel, 20, 30
Bois, Yve-Alain, 81, 87-105
Bryson, Norman, 93-94 Eliot, Thomas Steams, 101-102
Burnham, Jack, 7-8, 59 Elsen, Albert, 38-41
Caro, Anthony, 37, 90 Forge, Andrew, 60, 94

Clark, Tim, 104,113,116 Freedberg, Sydney, 113,116
Crimp, Douglas, 25-26, 61 Freud, Sigmund, 75-76
Crow, Thomas, 23, 26,113,116 Fried, Michael: influenced by
Greenberg, 27, 28, 75, 76-77; mod-
Danto, Arthur: art and transfiguration, ernism and negation, 34; rival of
75; art's essence, 61, 62, 67; Carte- Krauss, 9-10,11; works: "Art and
sian philosophy, 99-100; end of art, Objecthood," 87-88, 89-90
112; philosophical art criticism, 4, 6, Fry, Roger, 95,120
124 Index
Girard, Rene, 73-74, 76 Nodelman, Sheldon, 38
Gombrich, Ernst, 43, 56, 57, 93 Nozich, Robert, 63
Goodman, Nelson, 93
Greenberg, Clement: Abstract Expres- October, 2, 22-23, 27, 57, 61, 80,104
sionism, 1-3; art after Abstract Ex- O'Hara, Frank, 3
pressionism, 59, 62; critics, 8, 9-10; Olitski, Jules, 9,11,27
discussed in Krauss's early Owens, Craig, 80
publications, 27, 28, 37-38; formal-
ism, 17-19, 99, 102; Hegelian histori- Parmigianino, 113
ography, 5, 46, 48, 55-56,101; Picasso, Pablo, 79, 91-92, 112
historicism, 57, 58, 71; influence, 114; Pincus-Witten, Robert, 8-9
Kantian theory of aesthetic judgment, Pollock, Jackson: Greenberg's analysis,
63-65, 66, 67; kitsch, 93; mimetic 18, 20, 91; Krauss's analysis, 28, 48,
rivalry, 74-75, 76, 77, 78-79, 81, 82; 73-74, 78-79, 80-81; Steinberg's
modernism, 33-34, 35, 47, 89-90, analysis, 101. Works: Number 1, 3
91; philosophical art criticism, 111, Poussin, Nicolas, 88
112
Greimas diagram, 40-42, 46, 47, 77, Rauschenberg, Robert, 23-24
89-91,118 Rodin, Auguste, 11-12, 34, 35, 36,
38-40
Hebridge, Dick, 117 Ruskin, John, 76, 77
Hesse, Eve, 78-79
Hickey, Dave, 18,116 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 11-12
Hume, David, 98 Schjeldahl, Peter, 18
Serra, Richard, 4, 25-27, 37
Jameson, Fredric, 8-9, 41, 42, 47, 77 Smith, David, 28-29, 37-38
Jenkins, Paul, 20 Smithson, Robert, 35
Johns, Jasper, 28 Steinberg, Leo, 33-34, 36, 37, 49 n. 1, 56,
100-101,106 n. 14
Kant, Immanuel, 63-64 Stella, Frank, 38
Klein, Melanie, 96 Sylvester, David, 65-66
Lacan, Jacques, 96, 99, 100 Tucker, William 7

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 38
Louis, Morris, 20, 27 Ubac, Raoul, 79
Mangold, Robert, 8 Varnedoe, Kirk, 80-81

Marden, Brice, 9
Mill, John Stuart, 66 Warhol, Andy, 9, 60, 61, 67-68, 73,113,
Morris, Robert, 90 118-119
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 36-37,114
Nehamas, Alexander, 2,119 Wolfflin, Heinrich, 28, 42-44
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72,114 Wollheim, Richard, 21, 48, 93, 96
About the Author
DAVID CARRIER is the Champney Family Professor at Case Western Re-

serve University/Cleveland Institute of Art. He has written numerous
works including Principles ofArt History Writing, The Aesthete in the City: The
Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s, and High
Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism.

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Rosalind Krauss

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Rosalind Krauss

Carrier, David, 1944-

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

Printed in the United States of America

The struggle of the spirit is just as brutal as the battle of men.

Copyright restrictions permit me to quote only three hundred

in Verona was one inspiration for the present Afterword.4 Danto's

The disturbing thing about false and erroneous statements is that

The Rise of Philosophical

We are engaged in a collective enterprise whose results can't always be

Visual art often is accompanied by words. Art critics evaluate con-

One way of achieving this perhaps impossible goal might be to write

Krauss has moved an enormous distance in thirty years. The story

I reconstruct Krauss's career, explaining the transitions in her

But Vasari and Greenberg are only marginally concerned with

Philip Glass and I . . . would go to La Coupole every night. At two in

Yet Krauss's interpretation of Serra remains of great interest.

A major philosophical art critic summarizes the cultural history

and the "informal" is her deconstruction of structuralism. 10 Krauss's

Krauss7 way to the optical unconscious is through a sort of free associ-

I disagree. Krauss's seemingly free associations are governed by a

electronic apparatus and blinking lights—what he calls Robot and

fluential than Pincus-Witten's? In the 1980s, there was a felt need to

At his strongest... Warhol has a painterly competence, a sure instinct

When his taste is challenged deeply, Fried makes surprising ob-

started out as a Greenbergian formalist, but parted from him when

scribes Alex Katz's cutouts with reference to a theory of perception

an iconographer trying to reconstruct the lost argument of a Renais-

visage two ways of describing hockey: a scientific account and an in-

12. See my "William Tucker at Storm King Art Center," Arts

27. Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New

In the Beginning Was

The most important consideration when it comes to investing in art is a

A major philosophical art critic changes how his contemporaries

Peter Schjeldahl takes a similar viewr:4

The American art criticism, usually termed "formalist/' that flour-

To understand why Rosalind Krauss's arguments were highly

Eighteenth-century Florence had painters who were admired then

nied by theorizing. Contemporary art is collected in depth by Ameri-

We have named this journal in celebration of that moment in our cen-

The Russian avant-garde artists who supported the 1917 October

We have no desire to perpetuate the mythology of the revolution.

constructivism . . . was required for a consideration of the aesthetic

It is not constructivism, but cubism, semiotics, and surrealism that

October will be plain of aspect, its illustrations determined by consid-

As Thomas Crow, w h o publishes in October, has observed, 1 6

Color illustrations are expensive, and so art journals using them

ingly dramatic causes. The Buddha, a very sheltered child, changed

Published in a catalog of the Museum of Modern Art, New York,

As Crow notes, she speaks as if to a seminar. It is too late when in her

lie figurative sculpture, which only those knowledgeable about ico-

While the artist might be creating a Utopian alternative to, or com-

This argument too is questionable. Is the good critical artist ahead of

[Morris] Louis embedded the release of color within a surface that

She uses Greenberg's concept of "all-over" or decentralized compo-

Terminal Iron Works begins discussing recent attacks on formal-

In Smith's sculpture, similarly, "the surface makes the work visually

economic issues, for critics of Krauss's generation had become very

Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

17. Even a small circulation publication requires patrons. The

35. Three American Painters (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum,

The semiotic square usually imposed an initial structure on a narra-

tion. Krauss says that the history of modernist sculpture beginning

His art . . . was fulfilled in itself and in the revival of monolithic