November 30, 1941

Rosalind Krauss (November 30, 1941) is an American art critic. She was an associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and publishes often in other prestigious journals.. Her books include

The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986)
The Optical Unconscious (1993)
Bachelors (2000)
Perpetual Inventory (2010) which is a collection of her essays.

Not all her criticism is analytical: "Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as “pathetic.” Still her goal is the Clement Greenberg model of criticism where a public and verifiable aesthetic evaluation is the goal. And since the 1980s she has also found inspiration in the ideas of Jacques Lacan.

In an essay on William Kentridge ("'The Rock': William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection") Krauss situates a drawing of his wherein he "pets the cat which lies in bed next to him in the absent Mrs. Eckstein's place, and the cat, leaping onto his face as though to comfort him, transforms itself into a gas mask, grotesque..."

This Columbia professor recently won a College Art Association distinguished lifetime achievement award for writing on art.