Thursday 14 May 2015
Medium specificity (for example oil & acrylic painting, digital & video art, installations & performance "art, etc) and essential skills for a medium - does it matter (anymore?)?
Medium specificity (for example oil & acrylic painting, digital & video art,
installations & performance "art, etc) and essential skills for a medium -
does it matter (anymore?)?
Medium specificity is a consideration in aesthetics and art criticism. It is most
closely associated with modernism, but it predates it. According to Clement
Greenberg, who helped popularize the term, medium specificity holds that
"the unique and proper area of competence" for a form of art (for example oil
painting, acrylic painting, landscapes, stilllife, portraits, installations, ready mades,
performance art, video art, digital art, etc) corresponds
with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are "unique
to the nature" of a particular medium. For example, in painting, literal
flatness and abstraction are emphasised rather than illusionism and figuration.
Medium specific can be seen to mean that "the artwork is constituted by
the characteristic qualities of the raw material." This would probably
include the techniques used to manipulate the materials. "Medium-specificity
is based on the distinct materiality of artistic media." As early as 1776 Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing "contends that an artwork, in order to be successful,
needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium."
Today, the term is used both to describe artistic practices and as a way to
analyze artwork. Critic N. Katherine Hayles, for example, speaks of "media
specific analysis." As discussed by critic Marshall Soules, medium
specificity and media specific analysis are playing an important role in
the emergence of new media art forms, such as Internet art.Medium
specificity suggests that a work of art can be said to be successful if it fulfills
the promise contained in the medium used to bring the artwork into existence.
Much debate can remain as to what a given medium best lends itself to.
Art dialogue in the post-modern period has tended to steer away from
medium specificity as a particularly relevant principle.
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