On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts

Abstract

274 I would like to acknowledge the support of a Leverhulme Trust research fellowship while working on this paper, versions of which were given at the 2005 Photography Theory Symposium in Cork and the 2006 annual conferences of the United Kingdom Association of Art Historians, the British Society of Aesthetics, and the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. I would also like to thank Jim Elkins, Michael Fried, Stephen Melville, Stephen Mulhall, Joel Snyder, and an anonymous referee for their comments on earlier drafts, and Claire Bishop, Dominic Rahtz, David Raskin, and Daniel Sturgis for their assistance with images. 1. James Elkins, ‘What DoWeWant Photography to Be? A Response toMichael Fried’,Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005): 941; hereafter abbreviated ‘W’. SeeMichael Fried, ‘Barthes’sPunctum’, Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005): 539–74; hereafter abbreviated ‘B’. The book to which Elkins refers is provisionally titledWhy PhotographyMatters as Art as Never Before. It has been widely previewed; in addition to various lectures and ‘B’, Fried has published short papers on Thomas Demand, JeffWall, and Luc Delahaye (‘Being There’,Artforum 43 [Sept. 2004]: 53–54; ‘Without a Trace: The Art of ThomasDemand’,Artforum 43 [Mar. 2005]: 198–203; and ‘WorldMergers’, Artforum 44 [Mar. 2006]: 63–64, 66, respectively). It was also the source of his 2005 Lionel Trilling On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts