If you have typed into Google, you have likely encountered a wall of academic paywalls (JSTOR, ProQuest) or broken links on university servers. Here is the legitimate landscape:
Krauss saw this as a lazy fallacy. She believed that simply declaring the death of the medium was an act of theoretical bankruptcy. Instead, she proposed that the medium was not a physical substance (canvas, stone, bronze) but a —a set of conventions, memories, and technical supports that an artist activates.
“a set of conventions that are derived from a technical support, but that are not reducible to that support, and that can be repeated across different works, generating a tradition.”
– Early essays revisit the Bauhaus and Surrealist experiments, showing how those pioneers already treated the camera as a thinking instrument. This sets a lineage that validates later “post‑photographic” practices.
Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Krauss notes that mechanical reproduction destroyed traditional notions of artistic unity and authorship. II. From "Medium" to "Technical Support"
If you haven't read the full PDF yet, dive in. It is a difficult text, but it provides the vocabulary to understand why modern art looks the way it does—and how artists navigate a world where all the rules have already been broken.
