Greenberg first achieved prominence with the publication of an essay titled “ Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in the fall 1939 issue of Partisan Review. In this essay Greenberg, an avowed Trotskyite Marxist, claimed that avant-garde Modernism was “the only living culture that we now have” and that it was threatened primarily by the emergence of sentimentalized “kitsch” productions—“the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture.” For Greenberg, kitsch was endemic to the industrial societies of both capitalism and socialism, and in his view it was the duty of art and literature to offer a higher path. Our contemporary world, though, is primarily an artificially produced world—in other words, it is produced primarily by human work. However, even if today’s wider populations produce artworks, they do not investigate, analyze, and demonstrate the technical means by which they produce them—let alone the economic, social, and political conditions under which images are produced and distributed. Professional art, on the other hand, does precisely that—it creates spaces in which a critical investigation of contemporary mass image production can be effectuated and manifested. This is why such a critical, analytical art should be supported in the first place: if it is not supported, it will be not only hidden and discarded, but, as I have already suggested, it would simply not come into being. And this support should be discussed and offered beyond any notion of taste and aesthetic consideration. What is at stake is not an aesthetic, but a technical, or, if you like, poetic, dimension of art. Greenberg expressed mixed feelings about pop art. On the one hand he maintained that pop art partook of a trend toward "openness and clarity as against the turgidities of second generation Abstract Expressionism." However, Greenberg claimed that pop art did not "really challenge taste on more than a superficial level." [7] Stephen Willats, Metafilter, 1973-5, Painted wood, Perspex, computer, slide projector and problem book. Collection of Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris A bold study that reads Greenberg against the grain of the critic’s critics, and sometimes against the grain of the critic himself.

Greenberg, Clement (1995). "Autobiographical Statement". The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.195. ISBN 0226306232. In fact, the aesthetic attitude does not need art, and it functions much better without it. It is often said that all the wonders of art pale in comparison to the wonders of nature. In terms of aesthetic experience, no work of art can stand comparison to even an average beautiful sunset. And, of course, the sublime side of nature and politics can be fully experienced only by witnessing a real natural catastrophe, revolution, or war—not by reading a novel or looking at a picture. In fact, this was the shared opinion of Kant and the Romantic poets and artists that launched the first influential aesthetic discourses: the real world is the legitimate object of the aesthetic attitude (as well as of scientific and ethical attitudes)—not art. According to Kant, art can become a legitimate object of aesthetic contemplation only if it is created by a genius— understood as a human embodiment of natural force. The professional art can only serve as a means of education in notions of taste and aesthetic judgment. After this education is completed, art can be, as Wittgenstein’s ladder, thrown away—to confront the subject with the aesthetic experience of life itself. Seen from the aesthetic perspective, art reveals itself as something that can, and should be, overcome. All things can be seen from an aesthetic perspective; all things can serve as sources of aesthetic experience and become objects of aesthetic judgment. From the perspective of aesthetics, art has no privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject of the aesthetic attitude and the world. A grown person has no need for art’s aesthetic tutelage, and can simply rely on one’s own sensibility and taste. Aesthetic discourse, when used to legitimize art, effectively serves to undermine it.

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Greenberg wrote some of the 20 th century’s most iconic essays on modern art. These include Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939), Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940), Abstract Art (1944), The Crisis of the Easel Picture (1948), and, perhaps most famously, American Type Painting (1955). While each of his critical essays made their own individual arguments, the overall outlook was the same – Greenberg believed it was the natural progression of painting to move into an increasingly flat, abstract language that emphasized the objectivity of art. In 1961, Greenberg published an extensive collection of 37 essays under the umbrella title Art and Culture, which brought together all his ideas for the first time.

In a later essay, “The Plight of Culture” (1953), Greenberg insists even more radically on this productivist view of culture. Citing Marx, Greenberg states that modern industrialism has devaluated leisure—even the rich must work, and are more proud of their achievements as they enjoy their leisure time. This is why Greenberg simultaneously agrees and disagrees with T. S. Eliot’s diagnosis of modern culture in his book from 1948, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. Greenberg concurs with Eliot that the traditional culture based on leisure and refinement came into a period of decline when modern industrialization forced all people to work. But at the same time, Greenberg writes: “The only solution for culture that I conceive of under these conditions is to shift its center of gravity away from leisure and place it squarely in the middle of work.” 3 Indeed, the abandonment of the traditional ideal of cultivation through leisure seems to be the only possible way out of innumerable paradoxes that were produced by Greenberg’s attempt to connect this ideal with the concept of the avant-garde—the attempt that he undertook and then rejected in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” But even if Greenberg found this way out, he was too careful to follow it. He writes further about the proposed solution: “I am suggesting something whose outcome I cannot imagine.” 4 And further again:More substantial than his 'Homemade Esthetics', but I would still recommend starting with it for a broader understanding of Clement's assessments towards art criticism (even if it can be sometimes shallow). So, the best thing about the essays are the more indepth/historical explorations of essays like "Collage" which gives a wealth of knowledge to its readers; but, those more "broad" essays, can have a lot of questionable stuff in it as well, like in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch". In it, Clement postulates that bad art/kitsch has the intention of being sellable and predigested (beside other points). First, there is nothing bad about an artist doing works for pay, he even mentions Hokusai in that essays who was an illustrator who worked in the low-art of ukiyo-e (instead of the high art of painting on scrolls and doors), and yet he was great. Rembrandt, Goltzius, Goya, Dürer, and many more, all worked in the 'low art' of printmaking, which was possible because of the inovantions in printing quality. As for predigested art, he mentions Repin in opposition to Picasso, but he doesn't mention what it really means to be 'predigested' in the first place. Is it a naturalistic portayal of the world? Is it the more direct portrayal of emotion? Is it the handling of the paint? I point to you Repin's "Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan" and Rembrandt's "The Return of the Prodigal Son"; one can derive similarities in both, while also differences will be observed. Are the similarities worse Just one year later, Clement Greenberg published the second of his instrumentally important essays: Towards a Newer Laocoon, 1940. The text was a continuation of Gotthold Lessing’s famous article Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry , published in 1766. Lessing had begun making distinctions between different artistic mediums including poetry, painting, and sculpture, arguing how each had its own distinct language of development which we should recognize and appreciate. Indeed, at least since Duchamp’s readymades, artworks that only exist if they are exhibited have emerged. To produce an artwork means precisely to exhibit something as art—there is no production beyond exhibition. Yet when art production and exhibition coincide, the resulting works can very rarely begin to circulate on the art market. Since an installation, by definition, cannot circulate easily, it would follow that if installation art were not to be sponsored, it would simply cease to exist. We can now see a crucial difference between sponsoring an exhibition of, let’s say, traditional art objects and sponsoring an exhibition of art installations. In the first case, without adequate sponsorship, certain art objects will not be made accessible to the wider public; nevertheless, these objects will still exist. In the second case, inadequate sponsorship would mean that the artworks, understood as art installations, would not come into being at all. And that would be a pity at least for an important reason: artistic and curatorial installations increasingly function as places that attract filmmakers, musicians, and poets who challenge the public taste of their time and cannot become a part of the commercialized mass culture. Philosophers, too, are discovering the art exhibition as a terrain for their discourses. The art scene has become a territory on which political ideas and projects that are difficult to situate in the contemporary political reality can be formulated and presented.

It becomes obvious that when saying avant-garde art is “elitist,” what one actually means by the word “elite” is not the ruling and wealthy but the art producers—the artists themselves. It would follow that “elitist” art means that art which is made not for the appreciation of the consumers, but rather that of the artists themselves. Here we are no longer dealing with a specific taste—whether of the elite or of the masses—but with art for the artists, with art practice that surpasses taste. But would such an art that surpasses taste really be an “elitist” art? Or, put differently: Are artists really an elite? In a very obvious way, they are not, for they are simply not wealthy and powerful enough. But people who use the word “elitist” in relation to art produced for artists do not actually mean to suggest that artists rule the world. They simply mean that to be an artist is to belong to a minority. In this sense, “elitist” art actually means “minority” art. But are artists really such a minority in our contemporary society? I would say that they are not. Though they were extreme, Clement Greenberg’s ideas reflected the spirit of the times and they had a marked influence on the leading artistic developments of the 1960s. The simplified, saturated Colour Field paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski are synonymous with Greenberg’s ideas today, defining the pinnacle of the Modernist era with a ruthlessly strict, analytical attitude towards form, color, texture, scale, and composition. Greenberg curated an exhibition titled Post-Painterly Abstraction in 1964 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which included works by thirty-one different artists; it was so successful that Post Painterly Abstraction is now recognized as a movement in its own right. Roger Kimball, Collected Essays and Criticism, by Clement Greenberg, edited by John O'Brian [ permanent dead link], Commentary, December 1987 Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection by Bruce Guenther, Karen Wilkin (Editor), Portland: Portland Art Museum, 2001. ( ISBN 0-691-09049-1) A wide-ranging and ambitious study describing how Greenberg’s subjectivity was related to broader patterns within American modernization and modernity, particularly to regimes of bureaucratization and the visual. The book aims to produce an archaeology of American modernism with Greenberg at its center.Griffiths, Amy (March 2012). From Then to Now: Artist Run Initiatives in Sydney, New South Wales (Master of Arts Administration). College of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. pp.60–61 . Retrieved 23 January 2023– via All Conference. PDF Building on both his own ideas about Formalism and the theories of the 18 th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Greenberg argued in Modernist Painting for a new, objective way of seeing art. He believed art should be viewed and written about it in an entirely detached manner, only observing the physical properties of the object itself. These ideas had a profound influence on a new generation of Modernist art critics who became known as the “School of Greenberg”, including Rosalind Krauss, Michael Fried, and Barbara Rose, each of whom adopted a similar analytical approach when dissecting a work of art. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2019-03-30 05:03:03 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA1154023 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set trent External-identifier in one? Are the dissimilarities better in the other? Even if we were to come to definitive answer, is the other even bad in the first place? Eventually, Greenberg was concerned that some Abstract Expressionism had been "reduced to a set of mannerisms" and increasingly looked to a new set of artists who abandoned such elements as subject matter, connection with the artist, and definite brush strokes. Greenberg suggested this process attained a level of "purity" (a word he only used within scare quotes) that would reveal the truthfulness of the canvas, and the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Greenberg coined the term Post-Painterly Abstraction to distinguish it from Abstract Expressionism, or Painterly Abstraction, as Greenberg preferred to call it. Post-Painterly Abstraction was a term given to a myriad of abstract art that reacted against gestural abstraction of second-generation Abstract Expressionists. Among the dominant trends in the Post-Painterly Abstraction are Hard-Edged Painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella who explored relationships between tightly ruled shapes and edges, in Stella's case, between the shapes depicted on the surface and the literal shape of the support and Color-Field Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, who stained first Magna then water-based acrylic paints into unprimed canvas, exploring tactile and optical aspects of large, vivid fields of pure, open color. The line between these movements is tenuous, however as artists such as Kenneth Noland utilized aspects of both movements in his art. Post-Painterly Abstraction is generally seen as continuing the Modernist dialectic of self-criticism.

Building on Lessing’s essay, Greenberg’s ideas outlined a historical rationale describing where the origins of modern painting had come from and where it was now headed. He argued that painting had been growing increasingly flattened since historical times, moving beyond narrative or literary content towards an emphasis on abstract pattern and surface, writing, “But most important of all, the picture plane grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the real and material plane which is the actual surface of the canvas.”Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: The New Press, 1999, pp. 158, 199, 255, 258, 275, 277. Public exhibition practice thus becomes a place where interesting and relevant questions concerning the relationship between art and money emerge. The art market is—at least formally—a sphere dominated by private taste. But what about the art exhibitions that are created for wider audiences? One repeatedly hears that the art market, distorted by the private taste of wealthy collectors, corrupts public exhibition practice. Of course, this is true in a sense. But then what is this uncorrupted, pure, public taste that is thought to dominate an exhibition practice that surpasses private interests? Is it a mass taste, a factual taste of wider audiences that is characteristic of our contemporary civilization? In fact, installation art is often criticized precisely for being “elitist,” for being an art that the wider audiences do not want to see. Now this argument—especially because it is so often heard—deserves careful analysis. First of all, one has to ask: If installation art is elitist, what is the elite that is assumed to be the natural audience for this art? Beyond such speculation, which is admittedly schematic and abstract, I cannot go. … But at least it helps if we do not have to despair of the ultimate consequences for culture of industrialism. And it also helps if we do not have to stop thinking at the point where Spengler and Toynbee and Eliot do. 5