In 1940 the art critic Clement Greenberg resurrected Gotthold Lessing’s 18th-century distinction between the temporal (poetic) and spatial (pictorial) arts. Focusing on the elaboration of this idea since 1950, students will attend closely to the theoretical, historiographic and  practical implications of the theory of medium specificity in the visual arts, beginning with the most basic question: WHAT IS A MEDIUM? The mediums we will attend to include: sculpture, painting, photography and film. We will end with a discussion of inter-media and mixed-media practices, paying particular attention to the manner in which electronic and digital media disrupt the theory of medium specificity. Students will write a research paper tailored to their own area of interest.