fine arts and the practical arts crystallized. Yet despite its age, the medium-specificity thesis continues to exercise a tenacious grip on the imaginations of artists and theorists alike. On the contemporary art scene, this is perhaps most evident in the arena of video aesthetics, where one group, the image processors, advocate their stylistic explorations on the grounds that they are concerned with the basic attributes of video. Summarizing their position, Shelley Miller writes: Electronic image processing uses as art-making material those properties inherent in the medium of video. Artists work at a fundamental level with various parameters of the electronic signal, for example, frequency, amplitude or phase, which actually define the resulting image and sound.' Undoubtedly many video avant-gardists are predisposed toward the medium-specificity thesis because, given backgrounds in the fine arts, their thinking has been and is swayed by the still influential tenets of Modernism a la Clement Greenberg. This approach to painting and sculpture is strongly essentialist. Greenberg proclaims:
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Carroll et al. (1985) studied this question.