Let's expand this idea a bit, exploring the meaning of "medium."
Painting has oil, watercolor, fresco, tempura, etc. on a number of different kinds of substrates. Each of these entails different techniques and materials that have to be mastered.
Sculpting in clay, bronze, marble all have their different techniques too.
On to photography: Daguerreotype, Ambrotype, silver-gelatin, platinum-palladium, carbon, etc. Color too, in it's many guises from Cibachrome to R4 to Fuji Crystal Archive. Now we have digital capture and subsequent post-processing (which gets displayed on a screen or printed on paper, etc,. all of which are media) with it's own set of possibilities and challenges. All different.
I think it's apparent from these few examples that each medium has its own inherent techniques, possibilities and constraints. Working within any single medium imposes these possibilities and constraints on the artist/craftsperson. How well one uses a medium to express and communicate is inextricably linked to the medium itself and the artist's mastery of its attendant techniques. What is possible in one medium is not in another. The choice of what medium to work in is important too. Some media have very different expressive possibilities than others (obvious case in point: color has possibilities that black-and-white doesn't).
So, does the medium influence the work and the viewers' appreciation of it? I would say, yes, indeed. And the more educated the viewer is concerning the technicalities of the medium, the more potential for appreciation of excellence they bring to a given work. I don't really think that artistic expression can be separated from the medium any more than logical concepts can be separated from language. The one without the other is either meaningless or inexpressible.
Best,
Doremus
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