In On the Museum's Ruins Douglas Crimp argues that that the acceptance of photography as a significant expressive medium in art "foreclosed" or at least disrupted the discourse of modernism in the art world. "Art world" is used in the sense of Arthur C. Danto: the network of artists, collectors, dealers, curators, historians, foundation officers, and critics which constitutes the material and intellectual circuit of art valuation, exchange, interpretation, and patronage. The modernist fetishism of art had to a large extent, transformed photography from a subversive element within modernism to yet another avant-garde stage in modernism's progress.

However, the appearance of photographs and photomechanically-produced media in the art world interrupted modernism's discourse on originality and the irreducibility--the aura--of the unique object, forming a fault line along which the sensibility called postmodernism began to coalesce. One site of this rupture is Robert Rauschenberg's photographic reproductions Jeffrey Abt paraphrasing Crimp's argument says:

By juxtaposing those flat, monochrome photomechanical images alongside, covered by, or printed over vividly expressionistic brush strokes of paint, Rauschenberg intensified awareness of what, in the discourse of modernism, constituted the essence of art as high culture: the texture and mass of paint deposited by the brush stroke, material evidence of the artist's hand--the artist's signature--in a work's creation. The tactile, worked media of art had become not only the preeminent signifier of the artist's presence in late nineteenth and twentieth century art theory, but also a foundation upon which the modernist epistemology of aura was in part erected. Moreover, by joining the photomechanical image and brush stroke on the same surface, Rauschenberg augured the use of photography as a counter-discourse to modernism. When the art world found in the photograph an artistic "there" there, despite the absence of the artist's hand-wrought mark, the discourse of modernism was breached.

Douglas Crimp argues with reference to Walter Benjamin: that:

Through reproductive technology, postmodernist art dispenses with the aura. The fiction of the creating subject gives way to the frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity and presence, essential to the ordered discourse of the museum, are undermined.

In his essay The Museum’s Old / The Library’s New Subject Crimp says:

For at a certain moment photography enters the practice of art in such a way that it contaminates the purity of modernism's separate categories, the categories of painting and sculpture. These categories are subsequently divested of their fictive autonomy, their idealism, and thus their power. The first positive instances of this contamination occurred in the early 1960s, when Rauschenberg and Warhol began to silkscreen photographic images onto their canvases.17 From that moment forward, the guarded autonomy of modernist art was under constant threat from the incursions of the real world that photography has read¬mitted to the purview of art. After over a century of art's imprisonment in the discourse of modernism and the institution of the museum, hermetically sealed off from the rest of culture and society, the art of postmodernism begins to make inroads back into the world. It is photography, in part, that makes this possible, while still guaranteeing against the compromising atavism of traditional realism.