Clement Greenberg

The Devil...

Picasso and Matisse deserved better.

It's at the Whitney.

arthur danto takes this motherfucker too seriously, i think. still love danto, mostly because his authorial voice is so even-toned and good natured, like richard rorty's. i am drunk.

I think ILX is currently in "the age of Treeship", and I think it is a good age. I am not drunk, but I am old and I have seen many ages come and go. Some were appalling. Nobody talked about Clement Greenberg for nine years, for instance.

thanks grampsy. i hope my contribution to ilx will be a positive one. do you have any thoughts on greenberg? i think he is a strange figure, as his success indicates that there was a strong desire, on the part of the art establishment, to "make sense" of the open-ended experimentation that characterized modernist painting. i think he would be an interesting figure to discuss on ilx though because his formalist opinions are, like adorno's, rooted in a deep distrust of popular culture, and so anathema to the historical ethos of this site.

I'm not a "poptimist" in that sense. I value Greenberg's distrust of kitsch, and of art that makes sense too quickly. I think people should be taking more of a Greenbergian approach to the new Daft Punk album over on ILM, for instance. People should be very suspicious of art that looks or sounds like an "instant masterpiece". They should be lauding and listening to art that seems or sounds wrong, or disturbing, or unfinished, or surprising.

I don't like many of the painters Greenberg championed (I hate Jack the Dripper, for instance), but at the time he must have got the right "wrong" vibe off them. That later turned into the wrong "right" vibe, of course, as Time magazine and all the rest invested in Pollock and canonized him. I like Greenberg's dismissal of "scene" and of Warhol and Pop Art as "scene artists". I like less his dismissal of Duchamp for the same reasons. But I respect his essential seriousness.

I think he loses in any comparison with Adorno, though, because Adorno was a philosophical giant who helped found an entire new school of politics. He wasn't a mere art critic, condemned to pick and choose from the artists thrown up by the society and the time he was in. For me, Adorno has far more resonance today, and it doesn't phase me at all that his dismissals of capitalism and popular culture seem themselves to have been dismissed. The outrageousness of Adorno's mix of communism and elitism is precisely what gives him continuing resonance, at a time when Greenberg's favoured radicals have come full circle to kitsch.