The [senior White House] aide said that guys like me [i.e. reporters and commentators] were 'in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality'. I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principals and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Ronald Suskind¹

In 1979, Rosalind Krauss recognised a crisis in the institution of critique. Aimed at the anachronistic medium-based distinctions still prevalent at the time, her text 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field' provided a cogent warning to would-be historicists. Krauss accurately surmised that, in the adaptation of conventional categories in order to account for contemporary art's ruptures with certain object-based traditions, the critic was in danger of losing the validity of the very terms he or she sought to protect. As she argued, in the discussion of post-War American art, 'categories like sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity, a display of the way a cultural term can be extended to include just about anything'.² Using the state of contemporary sculpture to force the issue, the text's implications are realised indirectly in the institutionalised linguistic parameters