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"You don't choose your response to art, it is given to you," insisted Clement Greenberg. Whether it was given to this man by inborn instincts or by the players and dynamic in the art world of his generation, Clement Greenberg's 'response' to art was fueled with a passion and perception that is arguably unmatched. Greenberg began pronouncing his aesthetic judgments in the 10s with a strength that lasted well into the '50s. He wrote with clarity about Modernist art, as an editor, a critic for the Nation, and throughout many of his influential essays.

Two of these essays, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" of 1, and "Modernist Painting" of 165 are both fine examples of his meticulous and deliberate writing style as he presents, definitively, cultural-art phenomenon that, although relevant to their current art-world, have an essential history.

In "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Greenberg discusses and concludes the caustic distinction between the elite world and deliberate difficultly of contemporary art, and the more accessible products created by and/or for the masses. Throughout Greenberg's deliberately tight essay, he speaks with stubborn confidence even of history's events and figures, and all though these are generally stable facts, I still feel he leaves little room for an important dialogue, however abstract. Let alone he should welcome the reader into a response, which is why I found it difficult, even intimidating to naturally respond to his essay. I found the climax of Greenberg's position to be contained in the the following statement. "If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch, we now see, imitates its effects. The neatness of this antithesis is more than contrived; it corresponds to and defines the tremendous interval that separates from each other two such simultaneous cultural phenomena as the avant-garde and kitsch...this interval corresponds in turn to a social interval (pg. 15-16)." Greenberg goes on to define this society as consisting on one side, of a minority of powerful and cultivated people embracing formal culture, and on the other side, a mass of the ignorant and poor who embrace kitsch. He states, "It is a platitude that art becomes caviar to the general when the reality it imitates no longer corresponds even roughly to the reality recognized by the general (pg. 17)." Then it is not surprising that, engulfed in his own political agenda of maintaining high culture, he would come to champion Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, whose artists produced works that certainly did not imitate a reality recognizable to the kitsch-ridden masses, if any reality at all. Certainly, where would we be without characters, such as Greenberg, so committed to establishing the U.S. with a respectable name in the book of Art. However, where would a near absence of pop culture and the masses put us? This is not a question that Greenberg necessarily answers but only relentlessly points out the vicious cycle of kitsch culture and the masses response to it and participation in it. He fails to discuss the essential nature of this cycle in the context that its very existence makes possible the elite position that the avant-garde art occupies. It takes the existence of both to create the very distinction that he obsesses over.

To draw on another connection between the two essays in order to dissect Greenberg's position, in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch, he speaks of the medieval artist "Precisely because his content was determined in advance, the artist was free to concentrate on his medium...the artist was relieved of the necessity to be original and inventive in his 'matter' and could devote all his energy to formal problems (pg.16)." Then the "high priest of formalism" refers to an artist of this practice as a "plastic artist who paid lip service at least to the lowest common denominators of experience." I am not attempting to make any kind of standing argument with this, as there is an immediate and obvious explanation which I am discussing, simply to explore for myself and further examine Greenberg's position. The medieval artist that Greenberg refers to was assigned his subject matter, and although this allowed him to focus on formal elements, it did not free him of having to represent the universally recognizable subject matter; realistic imitation that the masses could marvel at. In addition to this, there is still the concept of the paintings imitating and applying themselves to sculptural rules and techniques. This only helps to emphasize Greenberg's commitment to the concept of flatness being the essence of the two-dimensional art form, which he discusses in "Modernist Painting." Greenberg emphasizes the pure formal elements of abstract painting, such as its flat space, monumental scale, and patches of undiluted color. He makes clear his aesthetic theory of a notion of self-reference each painting that enters the continuum of art history is a critique of painting.

Now to move away from my own response to Greenberg, and discuss how certain art movements during and after his active years reacted to Greenberg's opinions and influence. Into the 140s and 50s, Greenberg's critiques and approval became parallel with popular opinion, as many art establishments worshipped the man who claimed he could judge the artistic merit of a piece by an intuitive inventory of its formal principles. His formal critiques were very narrow and forceful. With the rise of Pop and Conceptual art in the '50s and '60s, Greenberg's ideals came to be heavily critiqued themselves by the artists and critics interested in meaning. As we discussed in class, Greenberg pronounced what he felt art should be stripped of illusionism, the artist's feelings, storytelling, etc. With a growing number of successful artists wanting to play with these very concepts, Greenberg's notions of quality and purity began to reveal themselves as conservative and self-preserving. Post Modern art of the 170s, as varied as it was, was dancing with, not only abstraction, but political and identity related agendas, a vivid language between art and life, and a breakdown of high and low art that could simply not harmonize with Greenberg's position clearly set down in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Greenberg continued to write about art well into the 10s, and while much of post-Greenberg art criticism is dedicated to dismantling his ideas, they are now contained in and essential to the history, dialogue, and dynamics surrounding what art is today.

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