ABSTRACT
Michael Fried's art criticism of the 1960s is widely understood to depend on notions of "medium" and "medium-specificity" that he takes over from Clement Greenberg. The passage between the emphasis on medium and the accounts cast in terms of absorption and theatricality is essentially operated by a certain appeal to "the tableau," a term whose historical basis is clear enough—the French art and criticism of the eighteenth century—but whose weight in relation to "medium" is, at best, uncertain. The distinct re-emergence of the term "medium" in Fried's work on Caravaggio at a historical moment well outside the normal purview of modernism and prior to the emergence of the tableau offers, a valuable opportunity to explore its possible centrality both to Fried's work and to dealings with art more generally. The difference thus posed between an art conscious of itself and an art assuming the shape of a self is of some consequence.
