[1] 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 corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are "unique to the nature" of a particular medium.
[3] Medium specific can be seen to mean that "the artwork is constituted by the characteristic qualities of the raw material."
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.
Art dialogue in the post-modern period has tended to steer away from medium specificity as a particularly relevant principle.
[7] Tom Palin maintains the importance of a notion of medium to the practice of painting, with recourse to Heideggerian phenomenology.