Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Beacon Paperback): 0212

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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.

Clement Greenberg was born in the borough of the Bronx, NYC, in 1909. His parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he was the eldest of their three sons. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. O'Brian, John. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986 and 1993. 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.Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection by Bruce Guenther, Karen Wilkin (Editor), Portland: Portland Art Museum, 2001. ( ISBN 0-691-09049-1) 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. Greenberg Was a Prominent Essayist Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 1961, image courtesy of Boyd Books The standard exhibition leaves an individual visitor alone, allowing him or her to individually confront and contemplate the exhibited art objects. Moving from one object to another, this visitor necessarily overlooks the totality of the exhibition space, including his or her own position within it. An art installation, on the contrary, builds a community of spectators precisely because of the holistic, unifying character of the space produced by the installation. The true visitor of the installation is not an isolated individual, but a collective of visitors. The art space as such can only be perceived by a mass of visitors—a multitude, if you like—and this multitude becomes part of the exhibition for each individual visitor, and vice versa. The visitor thus finds his or her own body exposed to the gaze of others, who in turn become aware of this body.

Fernand Léger, Ballet Mécanique, 1924. Film still of the mechanized, animated Chaplin which opens and closes the film. Greenberg, Clement. Late Writings, edited by Robert C. Morgan, St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Detail of Susan Hiller, Measure by Measure, 1973-ongoing. Paintings burnt annually, in glass burettes, on shelf. 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. 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.Anatoly Rykov. Clement Greenberg and American theory of contemporary art in the 1960s, in Art History, Journal of the Russian Institute of Art History. 2007, no. 1-2, pp.538–563. 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:

Jones, Caroline A. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. The first extended study of Greenberg’s modernist ideas and of his significance as an art critic. Written at a time when Greenberg’s theories of modern art were under fire from a variety of quarters, the book presents an account of Greenbergian modernism that fails to distinguish between the early and late writings. 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

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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.” 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. 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.

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? Born in the Bronx to Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants, Clement Greenberg studied English Literature at Syracuse University. After graduating he drifted between jobs before finding his way into the band of writers and critics who called themselves the New York Intellectuals , including Susan Sontag and Harold Rosenberg. Many were Jewish and advocated left-wing politics, integrating literary theory with Marxist beliefs, but they rejected Stalin, leaning instead towards the liberalist ideas of Trotskyism. 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. 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? Criqui, Jean-Pierre, and Daniel Soutif, eds. Special Issue: Clement Greenberg. Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 45–46 (1993).On the other hand, contemporary art also functions in the context of permanent and temporary exhibitions. The number of large-scale, temporary exhibitions—biennials, triennials, Documenta, Manifestas—is constantly growing. These exhibitions are not primarily for art buyers, but for the general public. Similarly, art fairs, which are supposedly meant to serve art buyers, are now increasingly transformed into public events, attracting people with little interest in, or finances for, buying art. Since exhibitions cannot be bought and sold, the relationship between art and money takes here another form. In exhibitions, art functions beyond the art market, and for that reason requires financial support, whether public or private. Essays in French by an international group of Greenberg scholars. The focus is on Greenberg’s aesthetics and criticism as well as on his overall legacy, especially as they relate to France and the United States. But what makes Greenberg’s essay still interesting and relevant today is the fact that after stating his belief that only the “wealthy and educated”—that is, the elite in the traditional sense of the word—can be capable and willing to support avant-garde art, Greenberg immediately rejects this belief and explains why it is wrong. The historical reality of the 1930s brings Greenberg to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie is unable to provide a social basis for avant-garde art through its economic and political support. To maintain its real political and economic power under the conditions of modern mass society, the ruling elite must reject any notion or even any suspicion of having “elite taste” or supporting “elite art.” What the modern elite does not want is to be “elitist”—to be visibly distinguishable from the masses. Accordingly, the modern elite must erase any distinction of taste and create an illusion of aesthetic solidarity with the masses—a solidarity that conceals the real power structures and economic inequalities. As examples of this strategy, Greenberg cites the cultural policies of the Soviet Union under Stalin, of Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy. But he also suggests that the American bourgeoisie follows the same strategy of aesthetic solidarity with mass culture to prevent the masses from being able to visually identify their class enemy. Through the 1960s, Greenberg remained an influential figure on a younger generation of critics, including Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss. Greenberg's antagonism to " Postmodernist" theories and socially engaged movements in art caused him to become a target for critics who labelled him, and the art he admired, as "old fashioned". 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