This article is a reprint of Rosalind Krauss's 1975 review of Tom Wolfe's “The Painted Word,” published in Partisan Review. The review critically examines Wolfe's polemical attack on modern art, its creators, critics, and patrons. Krauss argues that Wolfe's fundamental thesis—that modern art is empty of intrinsic content and functions merely as a social exchange medium validated by obscure critical theory—stems from his professed inability to experience genuine aesthetic response to the works themselves. The review defends art criticism as a legitimate endeavor that aids viewers' authentic engagement with art rather than creating meaning where none exists. Krauss contrasts Wolfe's dismissive approach with the serious critical projects of figures like Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and Leo Steinberg, who, despite their different approaches, share a commitment to describing and clarifying genuine aesthetic experiences. She argues that Wolfe's theatrical style substitutes his own personality for substantive engagement with art, and concludes that, contrary to Wolfe's claims, the real problem in contemporary art criticism is not excessive theorizing but insufficient critical engagement with modern artistic developments.

Rosalind Krauss analyzes aspects of Richard Serra's oeuvre, and Clement Greenberg's opposition to it, by way of a discussion of several of his sculptures, particularly One Ton Prop (House of Cards) , as well as Verb List , locating the essence of Serra's work in that of the medium of sculpture itself: contrapposto . The article begins: “My flight from the house of Greenberg (Judd called us “Greenbergers”) began with Richard Serra: In conversation, Clem would dismiss him outright. “I think this derived from his indignant reading of One Ton Prop: House of Cards , with its four lead plates abutted corner-to-corner, indeed like a “house of cards.” My guess is that Clem made a snap judgment from this almost-cube that Serra was a Minimalist—an aesthetic neighbor of Flavin and Judd. But from the first, starting with my encounter with One Ton Prop at the Whitney's Anti-Illusion exhibition in 1969, I have seen Serra's work as being adamantly opposed to Minimalism and exploring, instead, sculpture's “aesthetic support.” All mediums derive their logic from such a core postulate. We could say that poetry's is metaphor; ceramics' is symmetry (as the two hands shape the wet clay on the pottery wheel); and sculpture's is most emphatically that of contrapposto : the bilateral articulation of the human form in terms of weight and support.” “Contrapposto : art-history speak for counterpoise—the necessary balance for the upright human posture. Freud tells a simple evolutionary story in Civilization and Its Discontents , the dénouement of which is the moment mankind stood up—left the ground behind and rose above it on his two legs. This moment engineered a momentous realignment of man's perceptual organs, he reasoned. Nose and teeth and jaws receded before the supremacy of eyes and ears, the animality of pawing and sniffing being replaced by the visual, giving way, instead, to beauty and detachment. Thus the mental space in the armor of humanity expanded. Detachment in turn opened onto newly established cognitive zones: reflection, logic, memory. “Perceptual distance opened a space within which memory developed and with it the grasp of history—of the moment of realization that one has left the ground. The brevity of that moment contracts it into a timeless purity, and the purity of this snap of the fingers makes it abstract.”

In his seminar “The Eye and the Gaze,” Jacques Lacan is forced to regard the problem of the unconscious through the grid of the Cartesian cogito. In the certainty of “I think, therefore I am,” which expresses the complete transparency of the self to its own apprehension, leaves no space for the ineffability of the unconscious. Lacan sees this proto-enlightenment certainty running through all perceptual mechanisms, as in Paul Valèry's poem “La Jeune Parque,” which declares, “I saw myself seeing myself.” Lacan turns to anamorphosis as a perceptual exception, in which there are two viewing points turned on the same object, neither coinciding with the other, such that classical perspective's fundamental unity of the perceiving subject is alienated from itself—a Spaltung , or split, that enables the unconscious presence of the uncanny and its castrative impression of death.

Rosalind Krauss argues that the 2020 Donald Judd retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art shows that the painterly side of this famously “anti-painter” artist was more pronounced than he would have ever admitted.

Rosalind E. Krauss discusses the origins and argument of Douglas Crimp's “On the Museum's Ruins,” celebrating it as embodying the epistemê of cultural rebellion.

Rosalind E. Krauss discusses William Kentridge's The Head & the Load .

Rosalind E. Krauss and Malcolm Turvey honor critic and film historian Annette Michelson, co-founder of October , who died in September 2018 at the age of ninety-five. They detail Michelson's contributions to the journal in essays, translations, and the editing of special issues, and announce a forthcoming issue dedicated to her scholarship.

In “Montage October,” which appeared in Artforum in January 1973, Rosalind Krauss argues that Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film was not only a celebration of a Marxist victory but also a demonstration of Marxist dialectical reasoning through montage. Krauss contends that rather than passively reconstructing the chain of circumstances that culminated in the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, Eisenstein hoped to draw a filmic equivalence between the leap of revolutionary consciousness, which opens up access to the future by transcending the real, and the leap of visual consciousness, which goes beyond the normal bounds of filmic space.