Perpetual Inventory

The job of an art critic is to take perpetual inventory, constantlyrevising her ideas about the direction of contemporary art and the significance ofthe work she writes about. In these essays, which span three decades of assessmentand reassessment, Rosalind Krauss considers what she has come to call the"post-medium condition"--the abandonment by contemporary art

The job of an art critic is to take perpetual inventory, constantlyrevising her ideas about the direction of contemporary art and the significance ofthe work she writes about. In these essays, which span three decades of assessmentand reassessment, Rosalind Krauss considers what she has come to call the"post-medium condition"--the abandonment by contemporary art of themodernist emphasis on the medium as the source of artistic significance.Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard argued that the postmodern condition is characterized by theend of a "master narrative," and Krauss sees in the postmedium conditionof contemporary art a similar farewell to coherence. The master narrative ofcontemporary art ended when conceptual art and other contemporary practicesjettisoned the specific medium in order to juxtapose image and written text in thesame work. For Krauss, this spells the end of serious art, and she devotes much ofPerpetual Inventory to "wrest ling] new media to the mat of specificity."Krauss also writes about artists who are reinventing the medium, artists whopersevere in the service of a nontraditional medium--"strange newapparatuses" often adopted from commercial culture--among them Ed Ruscha, Christian Marclay, William Kentridge, and James Coleman. Krauss's essays workagainst the grain of the received ideas of contemporary criticism; she considers thepostmedium condition a "monstrous myth." With Perpetual Inventory, sheoffers an alternative view.