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Clement Greenberg - From the Criticism category:
- Wyndham Lewis Against Abstract Art...
To be categorically against a current art tendency or style means, in effect, to pronounce on works of art not yet created and not yet seen. It means inquiring into the motives of artists instead of into results. Yet we all know - or are supposed to know - that results are all that count in art. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Culture category:
The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Efficiency category:
- The Plight of Culture...
Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Evolution category:
The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Habit category:
If you want to change your art, change your habits. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Influence category:
The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Meaning category:
I don't get into 'becauses.' When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go to the one I like most. If you start to say, 'because,' you get into art jargon. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Meaning category:
You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Meaning category:
Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Modernism category:
Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Modernism category:
Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins... (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Nature category:
A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view - the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Originality category:
All profoundly original work looks ugly at first. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Portraiture category:
With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Quality category:
It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on 'absolute' or 'autonomous' art: thus on visual art... that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Reality category:
Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is - among other things - continuity, and unthinkable without it. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Recognition category:
Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Recognition category:
One is also reminded of how, in art, the tortoise so often overtakes the hare... (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Shock category:
-Avant Garde Attitudes...
It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling - or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part of safe good taste. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Taste category:
This is how they first become accessible to broad taste, which is lazy taste, and by the same token to the processes of publicity and consecration. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Tradition category:
It belongs to journalism... that each new phase of Modernist art should be hailed as the start of a whole new epoch in art... each time, this expectation has been disappointed, as the phase of Modernist art in question finally takes its place in the intelligible continuity of taste and tradition. (Clement Greenberg)
Clement Greenberg - From the Truth category:
Complete honesty has nothing to do with 'purity' or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart. (Clement Greenberg)
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