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

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The relationship between art and money can be understood in at least two ways. First, art can be interpreted as a sum of works circulating on the art market. In this case, when we speak about art and money, we think primarily of spectacular developments in the art market that took place in recent decades: the auctions of modern and contemporary art, the huge sums that were paid for works, and so forth—what newspapers mostly report on when they want to say something about contemporary art. It is now beyond doubt that art can be seen in the context of the art market and every work of art can function as a commodity.

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. 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". 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. 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, Clement. Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste. Oxford University Press, 1999.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: 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 cannot be summed up in a single phrase because he never did likewise with his subjects. The only things worth writing about, he believed, were the things that couldn't be easily solved, or solved at all. Puzzles are what fascinated him, and he believed that all great art can be experiential - it's an experience not only of what consumes the canvas, but what consumes the artist, and no truly great artist lives in a vacuum. Great art, and the artists who create it, are living and breathing vessels of the art that came before them. To experience great art is to experience the greatness of civilization. Tekiner, Deniz. "Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning." Social Justice, Issue on Art, Power, and Social Change, 33:2 (2006). He Was Also a Curator Three New American Painters, exhibition organized by Clement Greenberg for the University of Saskatchewan, 1961, image courtesy of Tate, London

Stephen Willats, Metafilter, 1973-5, Painted wood, Perspex, computer, slide projector and problem book. Collection of Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris 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 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. 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. In His Later Years His Ideas Divided Opinions Frank Stella, Salta nel mio Sacco, 1982, image courtesy of Tate, LondonIn 1960 Greenberg published the most complete articulation of his basis for aesthetic judgment in an essay titled “ Modernist Painting.” This essay returned to themes that he initially had broached in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” praising the ongoing development of an art that entrenches itself in its “areas of specialization”—i.e., that focuses on the intrinsic qualities of the media of its creation, such as oil and canvas, rather than on “content.” From Greenberg’s perspective, the history of Western art in the 20th century could be seen as an almost positivistic march—from Paul Cézanne’s experiments with flatness and colour at the beginning of the century through the Abstract Expressionists’ gestural canvases—toward abstract art. This understanding of a progression toward pure abstraction left no room for influential conceptual movements such as Dada and Pop art, both of which he dismissed. In 1961 Greenberg published Art and Culture, a collection of his essays that codified what had become his persuasive and coherent criticism of 20th-century art. Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection by Bruce Guenther, Karen Wilkin (Editor) ( ISBN 0-691-09049-1)