The context of medium specificity: From Riegl to Greenberg

Abstract

By the mid-1960s the notion of medium specificity had come to define that which was most insular and protectionist about painting, with the idea of medium specificity entirely synonymous with the formalist criticism of Clement Greenberg. As such, the richness of the term, and its historical situatedness, was lost behind a particular defence of the virtues of modernist painting. This article attempts to draw out the history and nuances of medium specificity: to trace its development within an extended body of speculation ‐ commonly termed formalist ‐ in order to re-open a discussion, too often sidestepped within contemporary discourse, as to the relationship that exists between the work of art and that which the work of art can claim to bear witness to.