In applying Greenberg’s analysis to the current cultural situation, one can say that the contemporary elites collect precisely the art that they assume to be spectacular enough to attract the masses. This is why big private collections appear “non-elitist” and well-adjusted enough to become global tourist attractions whenever they are exhibited. We are living in a time in which elite taste and mass taste coincide. One should not forget that, in the current moment, significant wealth can only be gained by selling products with mass appeal. If contemporary elites suddenly become “elitist,” they will also lose touch with mass expectations in their business practices and, accordingly, lose their wealth. Thus, the question arises: How is something like “elitist” art possible under these conditions? 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. Greenberg Might be the World’s Most Famous Art Critic The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. (1950 – 1959). Clement Greenberg Retrieved from NYPL Digital Library. 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 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.

de Duve, Thierry. Clement Greenberg between the Lines: Including a Previously Unpublished Debate with Clement Greenberg. Translated by Brian Holmes. Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1996. Greenberg Was a Prominent Essayist Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 1961, image courtesy of Boyd Books Greenberg expressed mixed feelings about pop art. On the one hand he maintained that pop art partook of a trend toward "openness and clarity as against the turgidities of second generation Abstract Expressionism." However, Greenberg claimed that pop art did not "really challenge taste on more than a superficial level." [7] Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2019-03-30 05:03:03 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA1154023 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set trent External-identifier Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection by Bruce Guenther, Karen Wilkin (Editor) ( ISBN 0-691-09049-1)

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In 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. 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.

If criticism is in dialectical relationship with the art it studies, and analytic understanding is a kind of negation of the object understood, as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel thought, then the abiding problem of art criticism is to restore the art object to concreteness and particularity. There is no question that the strength of formalist thought such as Greenberg’s is the attention it pays to the material particularity of the art object. He was able to determine an object’s place in art history on a purely formal-material basis. Many of Greenberg’s ideas initially came from Karl Marx, particularly the belief that abstract avant-garde art was a bold and revolutionary move away from oppressive political regimes led by the Nazis or Communists. Another major influence on Greenberg’s ideas was the German artist and educator Hans Hofmann. In 1938 and 1939 Greenberg went to several of Hoffmann’s lectures which emphasized the importance of a “formal” understanding in art, where color, line, surface, and the relationship between planes on a flat surface were deemed more important than figurative or literary content. 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. 5Griffiths, 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