Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts

Abstract

How might philosophers and art historians make the best use of one another's research?That, in nuce, is what this special issue considers with respect to questions concerning the nature of photography as an artistic medium; and that is what my essay addresses with respect to a specific case: the dialogue, or lack thereof, between the work of the philosopher Stanley Cavell and the art historian-critic Rosalind Krauss.It focuses on Krauss's late appeal to Cavell's notion of automatism to argue that artists now have to invent their own medium, both to provide criteria against which to judge artistic success or failure and to insulate serious art from the vacuous generalization of the aesthetic in a media-saturated culture at large. 1 Much in the spirit of 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch', paying attention to the medium is once again an artist's best line of defence against the encroachment of I would like to thank

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