This
article was published by the New York Times
Book Review under the title ‘But is it Art?’ (September
12, 1999)
Barnett Newman famously quipped
that esthetics were of as much interest to artists as ornithology to
birds. His sometime friend, the art critic Clement Greenberg, one of
the most influential tastemakers of the century, was more concerned
with the exercise of taste than speculation into its nature: one might
say he was a bird-watcher who twitched. Late in his career, however,
he turned to esthetics, first in a series of seminars delivered at Bennington
College, a liberal arts school for women in Vermont, and then in articles
worked up from these lectures which he published in various magazines.
He planned a volume to be called "Homemade Esthetics", producing
a draft of its opening chapter. The book under review adopts Greenberg's
pithy, Emersonian title, and presents the polished "seminars",
stripped (unusefully) of their published headings followed by transcripts
of the Bennington lectures with a selection of each evening's questions
(a chronological ordering actually reads better). A begrudging and ponderous
introduction by the British art historian Charles Harrison tries to
bury the volume rather than praise it. Far from being a curio for scholars,
however, this book is a major event. With extraordinary sparkle, wisdom
and energy Greenberg's voice speaks to the present situation in art
more pertinently and pursuasively than any contemporary theorist.
By 1971, when he delivered
his lectures, Greenberg was in rapid retreat from an American artscene
he had previously dominated. The purist brand of flat color-field abstract
expressionism he championed had long been displaced by "far out"
avant-gardist styles, while his critical formalist position was isolated
and seemed irreversibly discredited. Bennington - dubbed Clemsville
at the time - was the gathering-place of the last of the Greenbergian
Mohicans. (It's a shame, incidentally, that the questioners are not
identified; one knows that the likes of Anthony Caro and Bernard Malamud
were in the audience). The mood of these seminars, however, is anything
but grouchy. They are principled and rigorous, to be sure, but disarmingly
pragmatic, suggestive of a liberal curiosity and catholic taste. Talk
of "advanced art" is rare and "ineluctable flatness"
is banished as the esthetician takes over from the pundit.
Taste is Greenberg's categorical
imperative. Philosophers after Kant, he complains, have evaded the challenge
of arguing for the objectivity of taste, while artwriters think they
can get away without verdicts. "Verdicts are the warp and woof
of esthetic experience", he insists. As for objectivity, its ultimate
proof is the unassailability of the canon, the historic consensus that
forms itself out of accumulated ("congealed") good taste.
Some names get dropped occasionally, he concedes, but most argument
about the greats concerns ranking, not qualification. Although good
taste is not objective like scientific fact - because it doesn't deal
in probative data - it is closer to being objective than subjective.
How much closer is relative to the degree to which it is cultivated
in a given individual, which only becomes clear posthumously (presumably
when that individual's tastes meld into suprapersonal esthetic consciousness.)
But quality cannot be codified or prescribed; the essence of living
art is surprise. It is the testing of conventions, which are nonetheless
vital, and an evident "weight of decisions", that ensure quality,
that expands the parameters of esthetic experience. New art needs to
be avant-garde, but paradoxically true revolutionaries are generally
reluctant ones: Stravinsky, Matisse, T.S.Eliot, and even Jackson Pollock
are cited for their reverence for the traditions they upset.
With more grace than sarcasm Greenberg acknowledges how the "far
out" art of the last ten years (ie the 1960s) had clarified issues
that esthetics of the last 150 years had ignored. "Art as such
has lost the honorific status is never deserved", he concluded,
referring to how, inadvertently, Duchamp-derived art relegated the object
as secondary to the esthetic experience it elicits. Unquestionably,
though, minimalism and conceptualism (and the whole swathe of movements
springing from them which increasingly dominate the artscene to this
day) represented a betrayal of the promise of the historic avant-garde
Greenberg so exalted. The problem is that such art is "all surprise
without satisfaction". "Far-out" art is obsessed by establishing
a place for itself "as though each move is recognized as a one-time
move that has to be trumped". The kind of art that identifies and
discards all conventions, and follows some idea, conception, or category
like serialism, objecthood, literalness, process, or simply of being
far-fetched or startlingly personal, consigns all the "decisive
moment of creation" to an initial choice leaving no space for further
intuitions beyond it: the actual making just becomes craft. When prevailing
taste is swayed by pseudo-innovations - academic "twists"
as Greenberg characterizes them, "academic" because they trade
in received not achieved decisions - the real avant-garde continues
underground. This sounds like a rallying-call to the Bennington faithful,
but Clement Greenberg certainly continued to look for - and at - new
art to the end. "Some people insist on up-to-date major art".
This book is studded with
bright apercus, sharp critique, and copious evidence of refreshingly
honest taste-formation. It is primarily for this last quality, the sense
of what it is like to be in the line of fire of esthetic adventure,
that Greenberg's ruminations exhilerate. He so ardently believes in
the notion of impersonal taste and the catholicity necessary for its
cultivation, that he looked at everything, including much art he must
have despised, (mis)reading it on his own formalist terms. ("The
safest attitude to have in the face of art is to be ready to be surprised".)
When an anti-esthete artist lets his guard drop - as they all do - taste
at its most conventional seeps in, he believed. Carl Andre's tiles are
better in copper than steel, he notes, playfully insisting on the relevance
of even tiny esthetic decisions. "Don't ever let a work of art
get swallowed up in its category", he warned.
The irony with Greenberg
is the ease with which the ideas of this apostle of taste can be liberated
from the dated abstraction to which his own taste actually led him.
He now enjoys cult status among a new generation of artworld theorists
who have no truck with the artistic values he held dear: the sociologically-oriented
T.J.Clark and the diehard Duchampian Thierry de Duve, for instance,
not to mention Charles Harrison, himself a minor player in Britain's
conceptual art movement. But for esthetic (as opposed to strategy-oriented)
artists and for retinal-pleasure seeking art lovers Greenberg's seminars
may prove empowering in ways that the theory-for-theory's sake brigade
will come to rue. There is a timely reminder in "Homemade Esthetics"
that no amount of theory can help an ornithologist to fly.
Clement Greenberg Homemade
Esthetics: Observations on art and taste Oxford University Press,
1999
Cohen on the critics:
John Ruskin: A New York Ruskiniad
Roger Fry: Fry, Freud and Formalism
Herbert Read and Peter Fuller: Seeing Moore,
the Case of Two Critics
David Sylvester: The Golden Lion of English
Artwriting exclusive to Artcritical