Medium specificity

Medium specificity is the critical doctrine, articulated most forcefully by Clement Greenberg in the 1940s and extended by Michael Fried in the 1960s, that every art form has essential properties proper to its medium and should explore those rather than borrow effects from other media. For painting that meant flatness and the shape of the support; for sculpture, literal three-dimensional presence. The doctrine shaped how modernist painting was valued (Greenberg praised works that admitted their own flatness) and framed the great minimalism debate - Fried's Art and Objecthood (1967) attacked 'theatrical' objecthood against optical art. By the 1990s Rosalind Krauss declared a 'post-medium condition' of pluralism. As an aesthetic the doctrine lives on wherever critics ask what a medium is uniquely good at.

Defining characteristics

• Each art judged by the properties only its medium possesses
• Painting's essence: flatness and the shape of the support
• Borrowing effects across media treated as aesthetic impurity
• Works praised for admitting their own material conditions
• Opposed by post-medium pluralism (Krauss, 1990s)
• Shapes valuation: 'essential properties' become critical criteria

Key figures

• Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) — Articulated the doctrine (Towards a Newer Laocoon, 1940)
• Michael Fried (b. 1939) — Extended it against minimalism (Art and Objecthood, 1967)
• Rosalind Krauss (b. 1945) — Declared the post-medium condition that ended the doctrine's rule

Example works

• Towards a Newer Laocoon (essay) — Clement Greenberg (1940)
• Art and Objecthood (essay) — Michael Fried (1967)

Sources

• Medium specificity - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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