"Reinventing the Medium" is a pivotal essay that showcases Krauss's unique critical voice and intellectual rigor. First published in 1996, the essay was a response to the rapidly changing art world, which was increasingly dominated by new media and technologies. Krauss's central argument was that the medium of photography, in particular, was undergoing a significant transformation, one that required critics and artists to rethink their assumptions about the very nature of art.

Krauss examines three artists who, each in their own way, reinvented a medium:

When a technology is shiny, new, and commercially viable, it operates as a tool of capitalism, shaping human behavior and consumer desires. However, once that technology is rendered obsolete by newer inventions (such as the slide projector being replaced by digital video), it is liberated from its commercial utility.

By removing the image (the picture of a landscape or a person), the artist forces the viewer to look at the —the physical fabric, the texture of the paint, the wall behind it. They take the "automatic" part of painting (the canvas) and turn it into the subject itself.