However, while Lessing focuses his efforts on the interrelation of painting and poetry, Greenberg concentrates exclusively on the plastic arts. Lessing's petition for a distinction between media was taken up by Greenberg in his 1940 essay, Towards a New Laocošn and later in Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Lessing contends that an artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium. He refers to the media as "two equitable and friendly neighbors" (Lessing, 1766:91), who should not overstep their respective terrains. Lessing dismantles Horace's famous claim " ut pictura poesis" (as is painting, so is poetry), arguing that these media are inherently different, because while poetry unfolds in time, painting exists in space. The concept, however, can be traced back to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's 1766 essay, Laocošn. The insistence on medium-specificity arose in the era of modernism, and has become associated with the art critic Clement Greenberg. In order for a medium to have characteristic qualities it must be grounded in a tradition that has established these as intrinsic properties. ![]() ![]() Eliot argues that a writer never starts on a blank page, and by the same token a painter never begins with a blank canvas, and the same follows for all media. Eliot explains this faculty of medium-specificity in his essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent: "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.You cannot value him alone you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead" (Eliot, 1922:2). The qualities that define a medium are not irreducible or inherent properties artistic media are historically constructed categories of tools and practices. ![]() Medium-specificity is based on the distinct materiality of artistic media however, these categories are primarily defined by convention. For example, a painting that is medium specific is comprised of paint and surface (the "operation"), and also represents and imitates these materials (the "effect"). What does it mean, though, to be specific to a medium? The OED defines specific as "Specially or peculiarly pertaining to a certain thing or class of things and constituting one of the characteristic features of this." If the "class of things" is taken to be artistic media, then being specific means that the artwork is constituted by the characteristic qualities of the raw material. The OED defines " specificity" as "The quality or fact of being specific in operation or effect," or "being specific in character." The OED defines "medium," in terms of the arts, as "any raw material or mode of expression used in an artistic or creative activity." In linking these two words to form the phrase "medium-specificity," a composite definition can be made: the quality of being specific, in operation and effect, to the character of the raw material being used as a mode of artistic expression. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1977. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Partisan Review, Fall 1940. "Towards a New Laocošn." Partisan Review, July-August1940 Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946. Gauss, Kathleen McCarthy and Grundberg, Andy. "Art and Objecthood." ArtForum, June 1967. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.įried, Michael.
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