Her commitment to the emerging minimal art in particular set her apart from Michael Fried, who was oriented toward the continuation of modernist abstraction in Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland and Anthony Caro.
Krauss became dissatisfied with Artforum when in its November 1974 issue it published a full-page advertisement by featuring the artist Lynda Benglis aggressively posed with a large latex dildo and wearing only a pair of sunglasses promoting an upcoming exhibition of hers at the Paula Cooper Gallery.
[6] October was formed as a politically-charged journal that introduced American readers to the ideas of French post-structuralism, made popular by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.
In 1990, after Crimp left the journal, Krauss and Michelson were joined by Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Denis Hollier, and John Rajchman.
She has, for example, been interested in the development of photography, whose history—running parallel to that of modernist painting and sculpture—makes visible certain previously overlooked phenomena in the "high arts", such as the role of the indexical mark, or the function of the archive.
She has also investigated certain concepts, such as "formlessness", "the optical unconscious", or "pastiche", which organize modernist practice in relation to different explanatory grids from those of progressive modernism, or the avant-garde.
Decades after her first engagement with Greenberg, Krauss still used his ideas about an artwork's 'medium' as a jumping-off point for her strongest effort to come to terms with post-1980 art in the person of William Kentridge.
Whether about (Cubist collage, Surrealist photography, early Giacometti sculpture, Rodin, Brâncuși, Pollock) or about art contemporaneous to her own writing (Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman), Krauss translates the ephemeralities of visual and bodily experience into precise, vivid English, which has solidified her prestige as a critic.
In her study of Surrealist photography, she rejected William Rubin's efforts at formal categorization as insufficient, instead advocating the psychoanalytic categories of "dream" and "automatism", as well as Jacques Derrida's "grammatological" idea of "spacing."
Concerning Cubist art, she took Picasso's collage breakthrough to be explicable in terms of Saussure's ideas about the differential relations and non-referentiality of language, rejecting efforts by other scholars to tie the pasted newspaper clippings to social history.
Similarly, she held Picasso's stylistic developments in Cubist portraiture to be products of theoretical problems internal to art, rather than outcomes of the artist's love life.
From the 1980s, she became increasingly concerned with using a psychoanalytic understanding of drives and the unconscious, owing less to the Freudianism of an André Breton or a Salvador Dalí, and much more to the structuralist Lacan and the "dissident surrealist" Bataille.
This direction provided intellectual validation for the explosive Pollock markets; but it exacerbated already tense relations between herself and more radical currents in visual/cultural studies, the latter growing steadily impatient with the traditional western art-historical canon.