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The power of Steinberg’s horizontal argument also influenced his Hunter College colleague Rosalind Krauss as she elaborated upon Steinberg’s ideas over the course of her career. Two of these studies also engaged with the work of Rauschenberg as an exemplary artist of horizontality—first in the essay “Robert Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image” (Krauss 1974) and later in her popularizing contribution to the PBS television series Art of the Western World (Wood and WNET New York 1989; see Figure 2.4). Last but not least, Krauss returns to Steinberg’s ideas about the “flatbed picture plane” in an essay titled “Horizontality” and published in the catalogue for the exhibition Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), which she co‐curated with Yve‐Alain Bois at the Pompidou Center in Paris (see n. 2 in this chapter). This ambitious project draws on the ideas of Georges Bataille to craft a “base materialist” perspective on twentieth‐century art and its history. Nevertheless, the efficacy of applying Bataille in this way is debatable; this is a matter that I have addressed and questioned elsewhere (Kaplan 2010). Krauss’s discussion of Steinberg and the figure of horizontality reads in part thus: “The horizontal cast of this kind of imagery […] Steinberg related to what he called the ‘flatbed picture plane,’ and he aligned this conception of the horizontally laden canvas with ‘culture’” (Bois and Krauss 1997, 94).

Figure 2.4 Rosalind Krauss, As a Horizontal Field, Like a Desktop. Video still (detail with caption) from the PBS television series Art of the Western World, Episode 9, “In Our Own Time,” 1989.

One notes in the first instance how Krauss (in contrast to Alloway and, to some extent, in contrast to Steinberg himself) refuses to entertain the larger implications of horizontality and the radical challenge that it poses to the proper borders of art and to the determination of aesthetic value. She begins her analysis with a reaffirmation of Steinberg’s flatbed picture plane: “For Steinberg had been addressing what he saw as a radical change in the aesthetic premises of contemporary art, a change that he called a ‘shift from nature to culture’” (Krauss 2002, 39). What Krauss fails to acknowledge, though, is that the radical change that comes with horizontality offers a stinging critique of the pyramidal premises that ground contemporary art. In other words, horizontality disenables the aesthetic distinctions upon which the concept of contemporary art relies. In this way, the shift from nature to culture also constitutes a shift from art (and its aesthetic judgment) to visual culture (and its operational practices). The inability to recognize such a consequence anticipates Krauss’s later hostility to visual culture and to visual studies (as the anti‐disciplinary practice whose specific object is visual culture). Krauss then concludes with another explication that frames her art historical limits. “And, [Steinberg] asserted, this change in direction had made available to contemporary art an entirely new range of content” (Krauss 2002, 39). While one lauds Krauss’s playful use here of the term “change in direction” to signal the move from vertical to horizontal, this shift cannot be confined to the notion of an expanded field. In other words, the move to horizontality does not merely entertain an “entirely new range of content” for contemporary art. As discussed previously, when Steinberg speaks of Rauschenberg’s “letting the world in,” one can no longer tell where art ends and where life begins. Krauss therefore represses Rauschenberg’s neo‐Dadaist and post‐Duchampian breakdown of art and life that sometimes goes under the rubric of nominalism and that sees “art,” via the gesture of the readymade, as nothing more than an effect of naming and framing, or what Duchamp and the Cage circle, including Rauschenberg, proffered as the “aesthetic of indifference” (Roth 1977). It follows, then, that, when Krauss (1977) did take up the significance of Duchamp’s work, her focus was on his fascination with the indexical sign rather than on the readymade and the question of artistic value in general.

In May 1997 or some time in that year, when Formless: A User’s Guide was published in English, Krauss travelled to her alma mater to deliver the keynote address on Alumni Day at the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. During that visit, the then Columbia University professor and October journal co‐editor conducted a surprising interview with Scott Rothkopf (1997) published in the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson under the title “Krauss and the Art of Cultural Controversy.” Rothkopf asks Krauss, rather innocuously, whether she supports the idea of survey courses in art history departments “working with the concept of ‘visual culture’”; and he points to a specific interdisciplinary introductory course already instituted at Harvard. Before he can even finish his point, Krauss snaps back and pounces on her interlocutor with a reactionary form of hate speech. “I hate visual culture.” Jan Baetens (2012, 92) analyzes it astutely as an “(in)famous attack on visual studies and its specific object: visual culture.” Her opening salvo is a short and pithy “dissing” of this upstart that the art historian deems to be her discipline’s arch‐enemy. Krauss’s antagonistic declaration is followed by Rothkopf’s double take, as he seeks further clarification about such an abrupt dismissal: “You hate visual culture?” But there is no apology or nuance to be had, as Krauss’s bashing of visual culture is elaborated even further.

Let us recall that this interview took place a year after the influential “Visual Culture Questionnaire” (The Editors 1996) published in October where a number of contemporary thinkers were asked to respond to the rise of visual culture with a set of leading statements. But given the brusque and nasty things that Krauss has to say in this interview, perhaps it should have been called the “Visual Culture Inquisition.” Krauss openly admits that the Questionnaire was an assault designed to put visual culture on the defensive, or even out of business. She frames it this way: “In fact, October magazine, which I coedit and cofounded in 1976, recently did a special issue that was an attack on the visual culture project” (Rothkopf 1997). By referring to it in a disparaging manner as the “visual culture project,” Krauss projects visual culture into the future, refusing to grant it the status of an intellectual discourse or a viable practice in the present.

One can interpret Krauss’ attack in this interview as a disavowal (and othering) of visual culture and thereby as an attempt to reinstitute certain elitist art historical assumptions in the face of the visual cultural tendency toward leveling and its inter‐ or antidisciplinary aspects. After her flippant reactionary opener, Krauss launches into a self‐declared pejorative and abusive diatribe against the new project on these two counts. She asserts:

Like cultural studies, visual culture is aimed at what we could call pejoratively, abusively, deskilling. Part of that project is to attack the very idea of disciplines which are bound to knowing how to do something, certain skills… Obviously, in French literature you would to be able to read French very well, not just modern French but Medieval French. In art history there are also skills, like connoisseurship, and at least some slight knowledge of conservation. (Krauss, quoted in Rothkopf 1997)

But, if we take Krauss’s initial objection of “deskilling” seriously, we have to ask whether connoisseurship is really a skill to be lauded or simply a mode of distinction based on the making of distinctions (in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense; see Bourdieu 1979)—and one that results in setting up a privileged class of “knowers” who rule the day (and the art market) through their impositions of aesthetic value. In a manner intertwined with the question of deskilling and the need for art historical reskilling, Krauss also launches into visual studies and its visual cultural object, describing them as anti‐disciplinary. In other words, she argues that it is visual culture’s disregard for the disciplines that engenders deskilling. To recite: “So what I have against ‘visual studies’ is the project of getting rid of the disciplines. People say ‘film studies, what’s that?’ or ‘art history, je ne connais pas.’ That’s just forgetting about the fact that there are certain skills involved in both the fabrications of certain objects and the unpacking of those objects” (Rothkopf 1997).

What we witness in the Rothkopf interview, then, is Krauss’s partial recanting of the implications of Steinberg’s position with a concerted attack on visual culture along the lines of deskilling and anti‐disciplinarity. Crucially, visual culture and visual studies become the target of her attack precisely on account of an assertion that affirms horizontal thinking. Thus Krauss’s diatribe is directed precisely against the leveling that visual culture as a mode of criticism introduces. She calls in turn for reskilling and for the reassertion of disciplinary constraints that she believes only art history can provide. In this way Krauss’s hatred of visual culture turns out to be another attempt to recuperate the aura of art through an elitist insistence that the art historical object carries a special authority, privilege, and stature. We have come full circle with this attempt to repair the rupture within art historical discourse that both Laurence Alloway and Leo Steinberg had opened up. The pyramid returns with a vengeance, as Rosalind Krauss and the October group attempt to set themselves up as the new custodians of tradition and as keepers of the flame in a last‐ditch effort to stop the dreaded emergence of visual culture and the triumph of horizontal thinking.

More than two decades later, there is still the ongoing need to resist any such artful reactions and retrenchments. We must stand ready to commit iconoclastic acts against those who would know better and who would resurrect the vertical and the pyramidal in the name of reskilling and of reconstituting the artistic elites. We must affirm horizontal thinking as, and at the very root of, a visual cultural criticism that seeks to put things into crisis. We must affirm horizontal thinking as, and at the root of, a visual cultural aesthetics that upends the vertical valuations of fine art. We must pursue horizontal thinking as a mode of inquiry in a networked digital visual cultural landscape that has provided us with a wealth of emergent forms and new keywords in need of theoretical, critical, and historical elaboration, whether augmented reality or interactive video games. To conclude with a prescriptive injunction, there is only one way to ensure an ongoing attentiveness to the disruptive legacy and agenda of Alloway, Berger, and Steinberg. In the name of visual culture, we must keep our eyes peeled and glued to the horizon wherever it leads, in a daily practice of drawing lines _______ and following them.