A&C 11: Clement Greenberg and the Great Divide

So far, I have examined how Kant’s views on the relationship between aesthetics and community have been reinterpreted in a philosophical context by Luc Ferry, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Rancière. Now, I would like to discuss the work of influential art theorists who have also focused on this topic.

Questions relating to the relevance of Kantian aesthetics for contemporary art theory are central to what Andreas Huyssen called the "great divide." This term describes the split between post-World War II Modernist formalism and the movements that emerged in opposition to it starting in the 1960s. In this context, Kant's legacy has often been viewed as legitimising the co-option of Modern art by mainstream institutions. The progressive response to this conservative process was to sever the connection between aesthetics and new forms of critical and socially conscious art.

This anti-aesthetic and anti-Kantian ethos was fuelled by the fact that Clement Greenberg, the undisputed custodian of late Modernism’s orthodoxy, famously proclaimed his indebtedness to the great German philosopher. Diarmuid Costello observes:

the widespread marginalization of aesthetics in postmodern art theory may be attributed largely to the success of Clement Greenberg, the art critic and theorist, in co-opting the discourse of aesthetics, particularly Kantian aesthetics, for Modernist theory, thereby mediating the artworld’s understanding and subsequent rejection of both aesthetics in general, and Kant’s aesthetics in particular. (127)

The two Greenberg

Greenberg’s theoretical output bookends his long career as an art critic and cultural advocate. The first burst of essays are the texts he wrote for the Partisan Review, especially the often quoted ’Avantgarde and Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a New Laocoön’, published, respectively, in 1939 and 1940. The second body of theoretical work was written at the end of his career, at a time when his legacy seemed increasingly out of touch with the most innovative art of the day.

In Greenberg’s early essays, references to Kant and Hegel coexist alongside Marxist-oriented analyses of class dynamics. In these texts, Kant is primarily used as an example of self-critical inquiry, which Greenberg believed was also important for understanding modern art. His main thesis asserts that there is a fundamental similarity between the process by which reason examines its limits and possibilities—thereby establishing certain foundations, which is the essence of Kant’s critical method—and modern art’s pursuit to grasp the specific characteristics of its various mediums and techniques. For example, Modernist painting’s self-critique, which is carried out not discursively but through thoughtful practice, led to the discovery that the ‘essence’ of its medium is ‘flatness’. This self-critique serves as the foundation for a process of progressive purification, through which painting—or any other art form—is stripped of everything extraneous and reduced to its true, bare essence. It is based on the analogy between the critique of reason and the critique of art that Greenberg refers to Kant as the ‘first Modernist.’

While Greenberg’s thesis accurately reflects the prevalent reductionist tendencies in modern art, the broader theory he derives from this observation appears implausible. First, artistic techniques such as painting are not universal in the same way that reason might be considered; rather, they are historically contingent human practices. Second, reason must be critical of itself to ensure that we don’t exceed the limitations inherent to us as embodied thinking subjects. This is important because poor reasoning can lead to significant negative consequences in all areas of life.

Conversely, there seems to be no compelling reason to censor, for example, Trompe-l'œil painting simply because it violates the medium’s essential two-dimensionality. While it does contradict flatness, this does not undermine the value of the artwork; restricting paintings to just flat, monochrome shapes offers very little artistic benefit.

Lastly, Kant’s critical method is not inherently evolutionary; there is no teleological progression of reason or an internal logic that drives it toward increasingly refined stages of self-understanding. In contrast, Greenberg argues that self-critique is the ultimate goal of art history, a stance that reflects the Hegelian aspect of his argument.

Greenberg’s’ attempt to construct a Kant-inspired theoretical framework for his art criticism has been met with a lot skepticism. Arthur Danto, for example, calls Greenberg ‘the foremost Kantian art critic of our time’ but chastise him for reducing the transcendental universality of Kant’s judgment of taste contained in the ideal of sensus communis to the idea that artistic expressions from all ages and places are fundamentally the same to the ‘trained eye’.[39] In this way, sensus communis ceases to be a transcendental regulative principle to become the empirically verifiable ‘con-sensus’ of an elite of cognoscenti.[40]

But Danto goes further, censoring Kant-inspired art criticism even when it is faithful to its source:

‘The mistake of Kantian art criticism is that it confuses form with content. Beauty is part of the content of the works it prized, and their mode of presentation asks us to respond to the meaning of beauty’ (‘From Aesthetics’ 109).

Danto sees artistic beauty as ‘embodied meaning’, a view that is very much in line with Hegel’s aesthetics, which strongly influenced Danto’s thought.[41] However, contrary to Hegel, Danto does not argue that the sensible, embodied dimension of art is subservient to the conceptual one.[42] Implicit in his position is the notion that to the extent that art’s intelligible content is presented to us via its incarnation in sensible form, the latter can be an object of discussion and debate

Stephen Melville, points out that criticisms of Greenberg’s work can become repetitive and almost ritualistic, turning him into the straw man of the neo-avant-garde.[43]

‘With the publication of The Collected Essays and Criticism, we may be coming at last to the end of the long artworld demonization of Clement Greenberg and so may be able to reconsider the terms and limits of his achievement relatively free of the thick miasma of non-readings that have so long obscured the view’(67).

References

Huyssen, Andrea. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Print.

Greenberg, Clement. ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. Ed. Francis Frascina. London: Routledge, 2000. 21-14. Print.

———.’Towards a Newer Laocoon’. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. Ed. Francis Frascina. London: Routledge, 2000. 35-46. Print.

Costello, Diarmuid. ‘Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65.2 (2007): 217–228. Print.

Danto, C. Arthur. ‘From Aesthetics to Art Criticism and Back’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54.2 (1996): 105–115. Print.

Melville, Stephen. ‘Kant after Greenberg’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56.1 (1998): 67–74. Print.