Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism

David Carrier

Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002 - Art - 124 pages

Rosalind Krauss is, without visible rival, the most influential American art writer since Clement Greenberg. Together with her colleagues at ^IOctober^R, the journal she co-founded, she has played a key role in the introduction of French theory into the American art world. In the 1960s, though first a follower of Greenberg, she was inspired by her readings of French structuralist and post-structuralist materials, revolted against her mentor's formalism, and developed a succession of radically original styles of art history writing. Offering a complete survey of her career and work, ^IRosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism^R comprises the first book-length study of its subject.

Written in the lucid style of analytic philosophy, this accessible commentary offers a consideration of her arguments as well as discussions of alternative positions. Tracing Krauss's development in this way provides the best method of understanding the changing styles of American art criticism from the 1960s through the present, and thus provides an invaluable source of historical and aesthetic knowledge for artists and art scholars alike.

Contents

• In the Beginning Was Formalism: 13
• The Structuralist Adventure: 29
• The Historicist Antiessentialist Definition of Art: 51
• Resentment and Its Discontents: 67
• The Deconstruction of Structuralism: 83
• The Fate of Philosophical Art Criticism: 107
• Index: 119

About the author

DAVID CARRIER is the Champney Family Professor at Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art. He has written numerous works including Principles of Art 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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism
• Author: David Carrier
• Publisher: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002
• ISBN: 0275975207, 9780275975203
• Length: 124 pages
• Subjects: Art / Criticism & Theory; Art / History / General; Social Science / Popular Culture