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1 1 The Leo Steinberg Research Papers are located in the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. There is a Finding Aid for the first part of the collection, while the second part (the so‐called ADDS) remains unprocessed at the time of this writing. I want to highlight the folder containing sundry notes devoted to the “Flatbed Picture Plane” and located in the Subject/Topics Files A‐H (ADDS Box T 30). In addition to Rauschenberg, Steinberg points to other flatbed picture plane examples by Daniel Spoerri, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol. While Steinberg was never a big Warhol fan, he nonetheless saw him as part of the flatbed camp. However, one detects a note of disappointment on the part of the great Leonardo scholar. “Warhol too. His 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962… & his Mona Lisa 1963 consisting of 30 bad B/W reproductions…”

2 2 Krauss’s writerly rhetoric reads as follows in the original context: “More than half a century later, a similar opposition between vertical and horizontal fields would be elaborated by Leo Steinberg, similar in that here too, pictorial representation with its alliance with the space around us and thus with something Steinberg abbreviated as ‘nature,’ was contrasted with a field of written signs, or what he analogized to printers’ forms, or flatbeds in which lines of type cast in lead are set, their necessary horizontality forecasting the reader’s orientation to the printed page” (Bois and Krauss 1997, 94; for more context, see Krauss’s entire piece, 93–103).

3 3 As one of my first forays into visual culture in the late 1990s, I engaged in a project entitled “Visual Culture in the Dorm Room” with the help of my student assistant Danny Klainbaum, while teaching at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. We documented the posters and photos on the walls of campus dorm residents in Wren Hall and I interpreted their meaning and significance along the long front of visual culture, whether the posters were of the reggae legend Bob Marley, of prints of impressionist painters, or of pop music idols of the nineties.

4 4 See ADDS Box T 28 in the Steinberg Research Papers for his list of “Leologisms.” The very term is, of course, a “meta‐neologism” designed to categorize the words invented and used by Steinberg (on a first‐name basis). Steinberg believed that the Leologism “postmodernism” (introduced in the “Flatbed Picture Plane” section of “Other Criteria”) was the most important of these inventions; and he joked that it should be included as an epitaph on his tombstone. Steinberg also refers to Douglas Crimp, who credits him with “one of the first applications of the term postmodernism” (Crimp 1995, 47) in an art critical context.

5 5 While it may sound flippant, I would like to consider a pop musical reference and to take it seriously when interpreting Steinberg’s comment that Rauschenberg’s combines “let the world in.” One recalls the Fifth Dimension’s smash hit medley, in 1969, of “Aquarius” combined with “Let the Sunshine In” (originally the last verse of a track entitled “The Flesh Failures”). This Grammy Award‐winning record collaged together two elements from the Broadway hit and counterculture musical Hair (1967). This scenario raises the possibility that this soulful and catchy tune was the unconscious source of Steinberg’s phrasing when he composed “Other Criteria” and when he engaged with Rauschenberg’s work between 1968 and 1972.