{"product_id":"perpetual-inventory-9780262518727","title":"Perpetual Inventory","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn essays that span three decades, one of contemporary art's most esteemed critics celebrates artists who have persevered in the service of a medium.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe job of an art critic is to take perpetual inventory, constantly revising her ideas about the direction of contemporary art and the significance of the work she writes about. In these essays, which span three decades of assessment and reassessment, Rosalind Krauss considers what she has come to call the \"post-medium condition\"--the abandonment by contemporary art of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the source of artistic significance. Jean-Fran ois Lyotard argued that the \u003ci\u003epostmodern\u003c\/i\u003e condition is characterized by the end of a \"master narrative,\" and Krauss sees in the \u003ci\u003epost-medium\u003c\/i\u003e condition of contemporary art a similar farewell to coherence. The master narrative of contemporary art ended when conceptual art and other contemporary practices jettisoned the specific medium in order to juxtapose image and written text in the same work. For Krauss, this spells the end of serious art, and she devotes much of \u003ci\u003ePerpetual Inventory\u003c\/i\u003e to \"wrest ling] new media to the mat of specificity.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKrauss also writes about artists who are reinventing the medium, artists who persevere in the service of a nontraditional medium (\"strange new apparatuses\" often adopted from commercial culture), among them Ed Ruscha, Christian Marclay, William Kentridge, and James Coleman.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eRosalind E. Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University and an editor and cofounder of \u003ci\u003eOctober\u003c\/i\u003e magazine, is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths\u003c\/i\u003e (1985), \u003ci\u003eThe Optical Unconscious\u003c\/i\u003e (1993), \u003ci\u003eThe Picasso Papers\u003c\/i\u003e (1999), and \u003ci\u003eBachelors\u003c\/i\u003e (1999), all published by the MIT Press, and coauthor (with Yve-Alain Bois) of \u003ci\u003eFormless: A User's Guide\u003c\/i\u003e (Zone Books, 1997).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50318722990354,"sku":"9780262518727","price":43.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_7323fdaf-06a2-4131-ad03-7e1eb955dda5.jpg?v=1727560310","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/perpetual-inventory-9780262518727","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}