piThe Optical Unconscious iis a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of vision itself. And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction.ppiThe Optical Unconsciousi will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepte