41 Clement Greenberg Quotes

Clement Greenberg quotes

1. Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

2. It belongs to journalism - and to the millennial complex from which so many journalists and journalist intellectuals suffer in our day - that each new phase of Modernist art should be hailed as the start of a whole new epoch in art, marking a decisive break with all the customs and conventions of the past. Each time, a kind of art is expected so unlike all previous kinds of art, and so free from norms of practice or taste, that everybody, regardless of how informed or uninformed he happens to be, can have his say about it. And each time, this expectation has been disappointed, as the phase of Modernist art in question finally takes its place in the intelligible continuity of taste and tradition. Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is - among other things - continuity, and unthinkable without it. Lacking the past of art, and the need and compulsion to maintain its standards of excellence, Modernist art would lack both substance and justification.

3. One is also reminded of how in art the tortoise so often overtakes the hare. Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating. This is how they first become accessible to broad taste, which is lazy taste, and by the same token to the processes of publicity and consecration. As long as they were trammeled up in the urgency of getting things said they were too difficult, too 'controversial.'

4. It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling - or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part of safe good taste.

5. 'Purity' of and in art - any art, including music and dance - is an illusory notion, of course. It may be remotely conceivable or imaginable, but it can't be realized because it can't be recognized any more than a 'pure' human being or a 'pure' (or, for that matter, gratuitous) act can be. All the same, for Western art in its Modernist phase 'purity' has been a useful idea and ideal, with a kind of logic to it that has worked, and still works, to generate aesthetic value and maintain aesthetic standards as nothing else in our specializing culture has over the last hundred-odd years. But this logic has also worked to exclude the decorative - the decorative insofar as it functions solely as decoration. It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on 'absolute' or 'autonomous' art: thus on visual art - including even architecture - that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not. Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins....

6. The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too 'innocent,' that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.

7. Perhaps the greatest change that industrialism (along with Protestantism and rationalism) has made in daily life is to separate work from leisure in a radical and almost absolute way. Once the efficacy of work began to be more clearly and fully appreciated, work had to become more efficacious in itself - that is, more efficient. To this end, it had to be more sharply separated from everything that was not work; it had to be made more concentratedly and purely itself - in attitude, in method and, above all, in time. Moreover, under the rule of efficiency, seriously purposeful activity in general tended to become assimilated to work. The effect of all this has been to reduce leisure to an occasion more exclusively of passivity, to a breathing spell and interlude; it has become something peripheral.

8. Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough. And this new sense of sin only contributes further to the enervation of leisure, for the rich as well as the poor. The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.

9. Complete honesty has nothing to do with 'purity' or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.

10. One cannot condemn tendencies in art; one can only condemn works of art. To be categorically against a current art tendency or style means, in effect, to pronounce on works of art not yet created and not yet seen. It means inquiring into the motives of artists instead of into results. Yet we all know - or are supposed to know - that results are all that count in art.

11. The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.

12. A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view - the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance.

13. The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced - or seems forced - to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an 'obscure' poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being 'worked out.' Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.

14. The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced. (1973)

1. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.

2. Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.

3. Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.

4. Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

5. For every good art critic there may be ten great artists.

6. The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.

7. You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.

8. Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough.

9. The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility.

10. One is also reminded of how, in art, the tortoise so often overtakes the hare...

11. A poor life is lived by any one who doesn't regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from what is gazed at, listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon.

12. All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

13. With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.

14. Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins...

15. Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

16. I don't get into 'becauses.' When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go to the one I like most. If you start to say, 'because,' you get into art jargon.

17. The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.

18. Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.

19. The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

20. Art criticism, I would say, is about the most ungrateful form of 'elevated' writing I know of. It may also be one of the most challenging.. if only because so few people have done it well enough to be remembered.. but I'm not sure the challenge is worth it.

21. I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.

22. Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas.

23. If you want to change your art, change your habits.

24. When you don't like something the words come more readily.

25. Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.

26. The peasant finds no "natural" urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort

27. The precondition for kitsch, is the availability of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It draws its lifeblood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience