Leo Steinberg’s (b. 1920) Other Criteria talks about the shift from the Renaissance, to modern and post-modern developed practices. The main point Steinberg discusses in his essay is how the orientation of work can change the meaning of the piece; the main example being the idea of a vertical piece resembling a head-to-toe image in the Renaissance period. He compares works by artists such as Picasso, Rothko, and Newman’s works; they all conform to the ‘head-to-toe’ orientation. He goes on to say that the shift in orientation of the work can radically shift the subject matter of the work, horizontal being more reminiscent of nature, and vertical being the shift to culture. Steinberg finishes off the extract by talking about the work of Rauschenberg during the 1950s which broke out of the standard picture plane of images; Steinberg said that the non-conforming nature of Rauschenberg’s works made them more personable and was a dramatic shift into post-modern art.

Richard Serra’s (b. 1939) The Yale Lecture discusses his practice of site-specific sculpture and the issues that are presented with it. He focusses on transforming traditional processes, such as welding, into the main subject of the work through the use of steel making; combining traditional methods of sculpture with the use of architectural technology, producing Modernist pieces. He focusses on how a piece’s context is majorly affected by the environment it’s placed in. There are a variety of problems with site-specific sculpture; a piece cannot be created in one space and then be transferred to a new location because the piece can be misinterpreted. Serra also says that corporate funded works are often advertised as public service works which detract from the meaning of the piece itself; it is also hard to justify creating such big pieces because they do not allow for secondary sale of the piece.

There are various connections that can be made between the two texts, the main one being the development of each practice from times as far back as the Renaissance to post-modern works; what is also interesting about this point is how the modern/post-modern pieces still have tones of pieces from prior movements, for example, the ‘head-to-toe’ orientation of Renaissance art being transferred to updated works.