Theorists have announced the 'post-medium' or 'post-media' age.

Theorists have announced the 'post-medium' or 'post-media' age, as digitized media can hardly be said to have 'essential characteristics' that distinguish them from others. Obviously there are still television channels, films, photographs and newspapers, however most of these are now different manifestations of the same collection of laws But if it is the case that 'Various cultural and technological disclosures have together rendered meaningless the same of the key concepts of new art--that of a medium', as Lev Manovich has levy it, then how can we think about art, or culture? [1] In a counter-attack, Rosalind Krauss has stated 'the ne for the idea of the medium as of that kind to reclaim the specific from the deadening embrace of the general.' [2] Krauss is right in emphasizing that media are 'layerings of conventions in no degree simply collapsed into the physicality of their support', on the contrary in her eagerness to distance herself from 'the international fashion of installation and intermedia work, in which art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital', she still restricts a medium to its have internal 'difference', to its 'self-differing' character. [3] plane her own examples make it clear that this is untenable. Aside from artists like as Broodthaers and Coleman, she discusses Barthes' discussion of film stills, on the contrary these may be the come of an internal 'self-differentia]' of film, whose central nature turn out to be in the still photograph rather than in the moving image, unless they are also photographs, and as similar they have infiltrated and influenced photography--Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills being just undivided obvious example. [4] In the guise of a radical of the present day step, Krauss in fact have the intentions a rappel a l'ordre--the cherished medium-specificity of her youth in fresh garb.

Nonetheless, Krauss's formulation of the medium as a 'layering of conventions' is valuable in its emphasis forward the temporality and mnemonic function of media. single of the benefits of the break with an essentialist approach to media should be a sustained investigation of media's historical lives and of the historicity of the universal of the medium. In its rife form, it is quite a late creation, as it emerged sole with the modern mass media. While we now talk of the medium as well as of the art of painting, it was one time only the latter. The words medium and media merely came to have something' like the meaning with which we are now make anxioused in the later nineteenth and early twentieth hundred years This current meaning is still more a matter of tacit assumptions than of commonly accepted definitions--attempts at these usually move round a centre around the storage and transmission of data or (in Bruce sterling's words) 'human sensory stimulus'. [5] The boundary medium has of course a wider meaning, and it can pertain to almost any means or intermediary phenomenon; this wider meaning was reintroduced by the agency of McLuhan in nascent 'media theory': a hammer or a wheel is a medium, an extension of man. The best-known traditional use of the mete 'medium' in the arts was highly specific: it single referred to the liquid substance (such as oil or water) with which pigments are mixed and applied. Painting as so was no medium. [6] If, in the conclusion the term medium in this specific meaning became prominent, it was to a large order because a class of phenomena existed that were not a priori 'fine arts', and for which a handy generic period of time was needed: 'the media', newspapers, film and the like.

Now that the limits medium and media have triumphed, the conception of the medium and the actual media are according to about already deceased. The digitized media adopt or mimic each other's characteristics; following in the footmarks of McLuhan, who stated that a recently made known medium has an older medium as its satisfaction Bolter and Grusin have called this proces remediation. [7] flat painting, which at first sight would assume to be resistant to digitization, has become absorbed in the proces as artists mimic the turn the thoughts of photography and as photographers create elaborate tableaux. In this way the digitized media can be seen not thus much as dead but as 'undead' media, phantoms of their former self Sometimes media die, if it be not that they are not all equally dead. near become undead media; vampires or phantoms that continue to haunt us. more [i]or[/i] less time ago, Bruce Sterling initiated a Dead Media delineate on the internet, which contains the panorama and the peepshow among others. It is called an archive of 'the deceased, the slowly-rotting, the undead, and the never-lived media', and another contributor has propos a 'taxonomy of dead media' according to which not all dead media are equally dead, nor equally alive [8] Perhaps it is time to conceive of media theory as Aby Warburg conceived of his art history, as a 'ghost story for the wholly adult.' [9]

LAOCOONISM AND GESAMTKUNSTWERK

In his 1940 essay 'Towards a Newer Laocoon', forgiving Greenberg explained how 'the arts' had in the fresh age been 'hunted back to their mediums'--how painting, for instance had striven to become 'pure painting' instead of 'literary', anecdotal painting. Here we view the convergence of the advanced in years art theory and an emerging medium theory. In this use of language, the medium (canvas with paint in succession it) is the material support for the art of painting, [10] Greenberg did not pay any real attention to mass media; without an art to save them, they were cast in the part of villains, as purveyors of kitsch. It was against the debasement of art by way of the mass media that the modernist striving for medium-specific purity of the arts was aimed. [11] Greenberg is an specimen of an important tendency in recent art theory which could be called 'Laoocoonism'. The founding thesis is, of course, Lessing's Laokoon, which is mainly preoccupied with the distinction between verse and visual art. [12] However, Laocoonism also tried to distinguish the intrinsic properties of the different visual media, similar as painting and sculpture. While an important impetus behind early Laocoonism was largely the breakdown of traditional iconography and conventions in the eighteenth centenary later Laocoonism increasingly pitted the artistic, 'pure' use of media against mass-media kitsch. [13]